Types of Liminal Spaces
Oct. 8th, 2026 07:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingToday in my class about ghost stories, we're reading Freud's essay "The Uncanny" (here's a PDF) in relation to a discussion of liminal spaces. It's difficult to say what a liminal space actually is, though! So I spent way more time on r/LiminalSpace than I care to admit and came up with eight general categories.
1. Spaces between destinations that exist purely to move people from one place to another, like subway corridors and gas stations at highway rest areas. These places lack a sense of stability, so you feel that normal social rules don’t govern behavior here.
2. Institutional transition spaces, like high school hallways and airport terminals. These places are often fine when they're busy; but, when they're not, they can feel disorienting and give you a strong sense that you’re not supposed to be there.
3. Off-season (or after hours) public places like playgrounds and amusement parks. These places seem abnormal when devoid of human presence and activity, and this sense of something not being right is often exacerbated by fluorescent lighting and general dilapidation.
4. Purgatorial commercial spaces, like dead malls and empty office parks, were built for heavy traffic and feel weird when empty. This is partially because the absence of people makes the artificiality of the architecture openly apparent, generating a sense of discomfort.
5. Thresholds between nature and civilization, especially overgrown infrastructure like parking lots or drainage tunnels, create an uncomfortable sense of ambiguity at the margins of inhabited areas.
6. Nostalgic time capsule spaces, like bowling alleys or basement rec rooms, don’t belong to the past or the present. Their atmosphere of temporal displacement makes you feel like a ghost.
7. Residential decay, which is often associated with the utilitarian Brutalist architecture of post-Soviet areas, places the viewer in an uncomfortable geopolitical time warp.
8. Cyber graveyards, or websites / forums / blogs created decades ago that are still accessible, make you feel like you’re trespassing in a ghost town that everyone else has left.
There's a lot of overlap between categories, and obviously I haven't included any analysis in terms of material conditions and history. Still, what I'm trying to argue is that the aesthetics of liminality are a type of visual ASMR that triggers the visceral response of "uncanniness," and I hope that general argument comes through in the images I share in the slideshow. Basically, when you look at a place that's familiar but also removed from an appropriately identifying context, it can feel disorienting and creepy.
1. Spaces between destinations that exist purely to move people from one place to another, like subway corridors and gas stations at highway rest areas. These places lack a sense of stability, so you feel that normal social rules don’t govern behavior here.
2. Institutional transition spaces, like high school hallways and airport terminals. These places are often fine when they're busy; but, when they're not, they can feel disorienting and give you a strong sense that you’re not supposed to be there.
3. Off-season (or after hours) public places like playgrounds and amusement parks. These places seem abnormal when devoid of human presence and activity, and this sense of something not being right is often exacerbated by fluorescent lighting and general dilapidation.
4. Purgatorial commercial spaces, like dead malls and empty office parks, were built for heavy traffic and feel weird when empty. This is partially because the absence of people makes the artificiality of the architecture openly apparent, generating a sense of discomfort.
5. Thresholds between nature and civilization, especially overgrown infrastructure like parking lots or drainage tunnels, create an uncomfortable sense of ambiguity at the margins of inhabited areas.
6. Nostalgic time capsule spaces, like bowling alleys or basement rec rooms, don’t belong to the past or the present. Their atmosphere of temporal displacement makes you feel like a ghost.
7. Residential decay, which is often associated with the utilitarian Brutalist architecture of post-Soviet areas, places the viewer in an uncomfortable geopolitical time warp.
8. Cyber graveyards, or websites / forums / blogs created decades ago that are still accessible, make you feel like you’re trespassing in a ghost town that everyone else has left.
There's a lot of overlap between categories, and obviously I haven't included any analysis in terms of material conditions and history. Still, what I'm trying to argue is that the aesthetics of liminality are a type of visual ASMR that triggers the visceral response of "uncanniness," and I hope that general argument comes through in the images I share in the slideshow. Basically, when you look at a place that's familiar but also removed from an appropriately identifying context, it can feel disorienting and creepy.
