On the quiet erasure of liminal spaces, and why our cities are choking on connection they can no longer metabolise.

Let’s get the convenient narrative out of the way first. Covid broke us. The isolation, the lockdowns, the years of enforced proximate solitude. That’s the story. Tidy. Explicable. Wrong.

Covid was the accelerant. The fire had been burning for twenty years, quietly, in plain sight, in the form of a very specific kind of demolition. The demolition of the in-between.

Not the big stuff. Not the weddings and the graduations and the rites of passage we still bother to perform for each other with flower arrangements and rehearsed toasts. The small stuff. The unscheduled, uncommitted, architecturally ambiguous stuff. The commute where your mind was allowed to wander without a destination. The queue where strangers talked because there was genuinely nothing else to do. The after-work drink that wasn’t really about the drink. The smoking area outside the office. Terrible health policy, I know, and I still mourn it, because that two square metres of designated nowhere outside every creative office in the world produced more genuine human connection than any team-building exercise ever conceived in a conference room.

The corner shop. The market. The library with its eccentric hours and its strange regulars. The pub before it got a cocktail list and a booking requirement and a vibe that expected you to have pre-performed your social life before you arrived.

All of it was a threshold. A place where you were neither one thing nor another. Not working, not home. Not performing, not private. Just between. Just human, for a few minutes, without anyone needing anything from you.

Those spaces are mostly gone.

I think it’s killing us.

Van Gennep Had a Name for It.

Arnold van Gennep spent the early 1900s doing what certain anthropologists do when they’re paying real attention, sitting with communities everywhere and watching how they moved people from one state of being to another. Boy to man. Single to married. Civilian to warrior. What he found, every single time, was the same three-part structure. You leave behind what you were. You float in the in-between. You arrive somewhere new, changed.

He called the middle part the liminal phase. From the Latin limen. Threshold.

Victor Turner extended this in the 1960s and said something that should have landed harder than it did. In the liminal phase, “the normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behaviour are relaxed, opening the way to novelty and imagination.” Old certainties lose their grip. Reality, Turner said, “can be moulded and carried in different directions.”

The threshold isn’t the uncomfortable bit you endure before the transformation. The threshold is where the transformation actually happens.

You cannot skip it. No morning routine, no app, no perfectly optimised schedule makes it possible to skip the threshold. You just stop being able to change. The self calcifies. The update never ships.

Now think about what the modern city did to the threshold. And then think about what the pandemic finished off.

The Pre-Existing Condition.

Here’s the logic that ate the in-between: liminal space is, definitionally, unproductive. You’re not generating returns. You’re not consuming anything. You’re just between. And between doesn’t fit on a P&L.

So the city, following the logic of capital with the diligence of a very good intern, colonised every bit of it. Gradually. Comprehensively. With excellent intentions and catastrophic results.

The corner shop became a supermarket became an app. The market became a pedestrianised retail zone with the same six chains in slightly different configurations. The library had its hours cut, then its staff, then occasionally its walls. The parks are excellent now, packed with approved wellness infrastructure and signs listing what you cannot do. The pub got a food menu. Then a cocktail list. Then a booking requirement. Then a vibe.

And then, threading through everything, the smartphone arrived to plug every remaining gap. The queue. The wait. The solo lunch. The bus. Every moment that used to be ambient and unscripted and accidentally social, converted into an opportunity to stare at a rectangle delivering algorithmically curated content calibrated specifically to your existing preferences. Content that confirms what you already think. Delivered by an attention economy that has every structural incentive to keep you from encountering anything that might actually change you.

The city was supposed to produce serendipity. That’s the whole point of packing this many people into one place, the density, the friction, the randomness. You’re supposed to bump into things that change you. Serendipity isn’t a bonus feature of urban life. It’s the mechanism. And it requires unscripted space. Space where you aren’t already inside a transaction. The hallway, not the meeting room.

We were running low on hallways well before covid hit.

And Then.

Every single one closed. Simultaneously. Globally.

The airport terminal stripped and socially distanced into something that felt like a waiting room for a procedure nobody had consented to. The commute moved into a bedroom on a screen. The chai stall closed. The smoking area closed. The pub closed.

What we got instead was Zoom. Technically impressive. Socially catastrophic in ways we’re still not fully reckoning with.

Zoom removed the threshold entirely. You went from your bedroom to a meeting to your sofa to a voice note to your bed. No walk. No commute. No five minutes standing in the cold waiting for someone three minutes late, which is, and I mean this seriously, an underrated piece of relational infrastructure. Just the texture of being somewhere in your body, between things, waiting. Gone. Every transition deleted. Every hallway bricked up.

The data that followed is not subtle. By 2021, Harvard’s Making Caring Common project found 36 percent of Americans reporting serious loneliness. Among young adults, 61 percent. Sixty-one. The WHO declared loneliness a global public health priority in 2023, citing mortality risks equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

Fifteen. That number is doing real labour and I don’t want to rush past it.

Not “something to be mindful of.” Not a vague modern malaise. The same category of harm as a serious addiction. For being alone.

Maggi Savin-Baden at Coventry University calls it chronic liminality: a state of perpetual transition with nowhere for the transition to land. You’re always between things and the threshold never resolves into arrival. What was supposed to be temporary has become permanent. The hallway is all there is. And the hallway, without rooms on either end, is just a corridor to nowhere.

The Young People Are Canaries.

Jonathan Haidt’s research deserves more than a gesture. The correlation he documents between smartphones taking over adolescent social life, roughly 2012, and collapsing mental health indicators, particularly in young women, is not subtle. Depression, anxiety, self-harm, hospitalisation. All bending sharply upward, right around the time the phone became the primary medium of being a person.

The hypothesis isn’t complicated. Adolescence is the great liminal period. The extended, vertiginous threshold between childhood and adult identity. It’s always been supposed to happen in unscripted physical space, genuinely unscripted, adult-free, nowhere-to-be physical space, where you try on different versions of yourself without consequences and gradually, messily, figure out which one is you.

You need the hallway for that. The park after school. The bus where you can be anonymous. The corner where your group hangs around doing nothing, which is not nothing. It’s the developmental work of learning how to be with other people without a programme.

The smartphone didn’t replace that space. It deleted it and replaced it with a platform that is always on, always public, always performing, always recorded. There is no threshold on Instagram. There is no between-state. There is only broadcast.

Then the pandemic put those same kids in their bedrooms for two years.

And we’re still surprised.

What Gets Built in the Threshold.

We keep talking about this in terms of loneliness metrics and mental health statistics. Which is fine, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t say the underlying thing.

Liminal space is where identity is actually made. Not in the moments of arrival or performance or presentation. In the between. In the wandering. In the not-yet.

When Turner described the liminal phase he talked about the person in transition as having, temporarily, no fixed identity, no rank, no role. Which sounds like dispossession. His point was that this is precisely what makes transformation possible. You cannot step into a new self while still fully occupying the old one. You need the suspension. The float.

Cities, at their best, used to provide that. The mundane, daily version of it. The commute where you were neither worker nor partner. The pub where you were neither professional nor private. The third place where your job didn’t define you and your history didn’t follow you and you were just, provisionally, a person among persons, working out in real time who you might be.

That’s not sentimentality. That’s structural.

Remove the in-between and people stop being able to update themselves. Identity calcifies. The self you were at 25, or 35, or whenever the world stopped providing you with unscripted space to be otherwise. That becomes the self you’re still dragging around at 50. Not because growth stopped being possible. Because the architecture that made it possible was quietly demolished.

And then we wonder why cities full of people feel so lonely.

Three Endings.

I don’t have a clean answer. I’m suspicious of anyone who does. The people building apps to solve loneliness are still operating inside the logic that caused it. A digitally optimised third space is not a third space. It’s a product.

What I do think, practically: every city planner, every developer, every architect deciding what goes on the high street, they should be sitting with van Gennep’s question. Where is the threshold? Where is the space that holds people while they’re between things? Not the event. Not the activation. Not the community programme with a comms budget and a content calendar. The genuinely unscripted zone where nothing is being sold, nothing is being measured, and people can just be between things for a while.

That is not a luxury. That is infrastructure. We defunded it. We can choose to rebuild it.

And then there’s the personal version, which is the one I keep returning to.

A lot of us felt it during lockdown, a peculiar nakedness that came from having all the transitions stripped away. You couldn’t leave. You couldn’t arrive anywhere new. The threshold closed. And what you found inside was whatever you actually were, without the daily movement and encounter and accidental friction that usually processes the emotional sediment. Some people discovered reserves they didn’t know they had. Some people collapsed. Most people just waited. Floated. Hoped the hallway would reopen.

It’s been five years. The hallways are technically back. But they’re fewer, more expensive, more surveilled, more aggressively structured toward consumption. And we are, measurably, lonelier than before.

Van Gennep’s insight was that the in-between was not dead time. Not the uncomfortable gap to be endured between the meaningful moments. The in-between was where you became who you were going to be next.

We paved it over.

We’re still paying the toll.