We ❤️ void-defying landscape architects. On places and subjects in the midst of transformation

Article by Yulia Kisora & Martijn Duineveld

In this article, Yulia Kisora and Martijn Duineveld engage with the concept of liminal space to explore how you can become a landscape architect (or planner, urban planner, architect) who is aware of the layered meanings of places and landscapes and takes them into account whenever possible.

r/LiminalSpace

Martijn has always had a fascination with edgy places. Getting stuck on the subreddit r/LiminalSpace, he can scroll endlessly through images of interiors, landscapes, shopping centres, supermarkets, prisons and metro stations (figure 1). What the images have in common is that there are no living beings to be seen; they are desolate places. The 233,000 weekly visitors to this Reddit community indicate that these images have a certain appeal (Reddit, 2026).

Figure 1: Stockholm Hallonbergen Metro Station. Source: Jakob Halun (2013). Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA-3.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20130601_Stockholm_Hallonbergen_metro_station_6849.jpg

But what is it exactly that makes these images so captivating? Perhaps it is the aesthetics that appeals. Perhaps it is the absence of people on the images, which means we are not distracted by significant or insignificant others — with their hairstyles, clothing, poses and the many millions of layers of meaning we can attribute to them. Perhaps it is the bittersweet combination of fear, of emptiness, of loneliness, of death. Perhaps it is the illusion of emptiness that can be filled with your own thoughts, your fantasies about what it is and what it could become. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps... We are merely speculating, because we do not know.

And yet - a piece of wasteland, a church without people, an empty office building. A deserted square. Emptiness seems easy to observe. It is often interpreted as indeterminacy of places. Those are places in wait, damsels in distress of all places: they can’t wait to be formally designated, designed and built on, but are still waiting for investors or for decisions to be made by the municipality. So, every time we believe we are looking at an optical and seemingly empty space, while at the same time observing a camera-directed — and therefore limited — view of a human being (assuming that most photographs are not (yet) generated by AI). The photos say a lot about the way we look at things: about the observers of a place, about the people who assign the term to a particular space. An empty space for one person may not be so for another.

Emptiness is in the eye of the beholder

When emptiness or indeterminacy looms, the eyes of those who contribute to shaping the landscape — landscape architects, planners, urban designers — often light up: there's work to be done! Isn't the world, in the eyes of a designer, one big liminal space? A state that can be improved: more beautiful, greener, more climate-adaptive, more inclusive, more regenerative... The apparent emptiness triggers a desire in designers to fill it. A blank slate — let's go!

Figure 2: nieuwe geul Meijnerswijk. Source: Jasja Vliegt. © Rijkswaterstaat. Non-commercial use allowed. https://proxy.archieven.nl/0/A43E343C01364AFBA862CD5C644A46DD

This became very clear when Martijn conducted a case study years ago, on the planning and design history of Arnhems inner-city ‘floodplains’ called Stadsblokken-Meinerswijk (figure 2). Project developers, urban planners and designers created dozens of plans and designs over the years in their desire to fill the area (figure 3). For them Stadsblokken-Meinerswijk was assumed to be an empty area, begging to be built on. Those eager to build saw it as a vacant lot in the middle of the city: a perfect location for the construction of a beautiful residential area, for the creation of ‘volumes’. However, research conducted together with some brilliant students from Wageningen University revealed the place had been appropriated by many people (and animals). The research taught him that Stadsblokken-Meinerswijk is a metropolitan world in a green environment, “where short-haired young people trip to the beats of DJs with exotic names, naked middle-aged men frolic, homeless people spend the night, nature lovers try to spot birds, foxes and mosses, and culture lovers marvel at the remains of Cold War anti-aircraft guns” (Arnhem Direct, 2016). From the perspective of its users, the illusion of this Stadsblokken-Meinerswijk as blank slate became a dangerous illusion of eager designers, urbanists on speed and greedy project developers.

Figure 3: one of the many ideas proposed for the redevelopment of Statsblokken-Meijnerswijk ‘De eilanden’ from 2009. Source: Cristoph Kohl Architekten in: https://www.gelderlander.nl/arnhem-e-o/peperdure-maquette-meinerswijk-gaat-voor-400-euro-naar-architect~a5046047/

So, while partially sharing the obsession with the potential of an imagined void, we nevertheless regret to function as a proverbial wet blanket in this essay. Despite appearances, on planet earth, there are always people present, even when their bodies are temporally absent. In the photos in r/LiminalSpace, at least one: the person who took the photograph. In Stadsblokken-Meinerswijk: plenty! Day and night, in past and present.

Of gaps and thresholds

Unlike Martijn, who get excited over grungy aesthetics of an off-season trashed beach, Yulia prefers her landscapes either wild and lush or cultured and neat. Those preferences might have something to do with the fact that while for Martijn, growing up in the Netherlands, emptiness and indeterminacy have always been a novelty. For Yulia, who grew up on post-soviet space, emptiness of transition expressed in landscapes triggers a different affect: that of broken dreams and violent change. Yet the scholarly fascination is shared, and, as they began to working on this essay, Yulia first turned to a vocabulary, an honorary bookworm that she is.

Landscape architects are probably familiar with the term interstitial. For those who are not: here is brief recap. The word interstitial entered English in 1646 (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.), in the writing of a physician and it has never left the body sciences. The anatomical interstitium is the fluid-filled connective space between cells, between organs, between structures. It is defined by what surrounds it. It is observable from the outside. It is, in a precise sense, what is left when everything else has been accounted for. When landscape architects describe the gaps, the leftover land along railway embankments, the fenced-off verges that slip from our conscious maps, they are describing something genuinely interstitial. Structurally residual. Morphologically defined. Mappable.

Yet when cultural geographers (and, apparently, the followers of r/Liminalspace), talk about spaces like that, we call them liminal. The Latin root is limen: the threshold of a doorway, the physical strip you cross when you move from one space to another. The word entered social science in 1909, when the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep used it to describe the middle phase of rites of passage - that disorienting interval when an initiate is no longer who they were, but has not yet become who they will be (Bacock, 2001). Victor Turner later developed this into the concept of liminality as we now recognise it: the 'betwixt and between,' a state of structural dissolution, social ambiguity, and radical possibility (Bigger, 2009). The key point is this: in Turner's sense, liminality is not a property of a place. It is a condition experienced by subjects in the midst of transformation. It requires someone crossing. It requires a community holding the threshold. Remove the subjects, and there is no liminality, only a gap.

Two words, then. Both describing in-betweenness. But answering entirely different questions. Interstitial asks: where is the gap? Liminal asks: who is crossing, and what is at stake for them?

The damsel, the expert, and the lives that happen while we are making plans

Let us return to Martijn's damsel in distress. It is a pointed metaphor - perhaps more pointed than intended. The interstitial space as a place waiting to be rescued: rescued by whom? By the expert who arrives, surveys the scene, identifies the gap, and proposes an intervention. The interstitial designation is made from an expert position. You do not need to conduct interviews with communities to identify interstitial space. You look, you categorise, you map. That is a legitimate act. But it is not an innocent one.

Notice what the interstitial framing does with time. It is oriented to the past. Interstitial space is a leftover, the residue of previous actions, or more often, previous inaction. It is defined by what was built around it and what was not. The designation says: this place has not yet been claimed by the dominant order. It is structurally residual. And in that residual status, it waits.

Now notice what the liminal framing does with time. Liminality is oriented to transformation - to a process that is already underway, already being lived by specific people in specific conditions. It cannot be observed in the absence of those people. You cannot map liminality from a distance. It only exists with actors present, in motion, crossing. The liminal is not a property of the space. It is a quality of what is happening to a place and its people.

This means something consequential for how we approach interstitial spaces. Every interstitial space might be liminal - but you will only discover that if you go looking for the subjects in state of transition. And here is what you are likely to find: these spaces are particularly vulnerable precisely because they tend to house those who are routinely excluded from political consideration. The unhoused person who sleeps in the gap between the railway embankment and the fence. The migrant community that has cultivated the unmapped strip of land as a garden. The non-human species whose habitat is the spontaneous vegetation of a derelict site. Displacement, extinction, marginalisation: these are the actual stakes hidden inside the neutral-sounding designation ‘interstitial’.

The damsel, it turns out, is not waiting to be rescued. She — or he, or they, or it — is already living there. The rescue narrative belongs to the person who failed to look.

A field-guide for void-defying landscape architects

Repeat after us: Emptiness and stasis are illusions of the observer.

The feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988) has a term for the pretence that knowledge can be produced from no particular position, that an expert can arrive at a site, survey it, and deliver a verdict that is simply true, neutral, unimplicated. She calls it the god trick. She would argue that every line drawn on paper, every space labelled interstitial, every plan drafted for a blank slate, is produced from somewhere, by someone, for someone. Becoming aware of that does not make you a worse designer. It makes you an honest one. 

To equip you we offer a practical guide. Start by asking yourself a few simple questions: How do beings interact with the place?; What meanings do they attribute to it?; What stories do beings tell each other about the place?; Who appropriates the place and why?; How do people and other beings get involved in the future of their place, for example through public consultation evenings, by lodging objections, or by developing their own initiatives? Who would be displaced by each scenario? Who benefits and who loses?

We will not accept an excuse of having no time, because we are giving you two options. Option 1 - going native (6 months-1 year): Delve as deeply as possible into the world of people (and other beings) who have used the place in the past, present and will do so in future. If you have the time, try to describe the history of a place, talk to as many users and other stakeholders as possible, and read everything that has been written about the place: in books, local newspapers, on Facebook (yes, some generations still use it), in blogs, on the notice board of the local supermarket. Organise sessions with (future) users and other stakeholders about how they imagine the ideal future of a place.

Option 1 is a lot of work, and often you simply don't have the time. Option 2 takes less time. Accept the responsibility of possibly destroying the unseen. Still, understanding something about people's everyday lives is better than ignoring it completely. Find a few well-informed people who know the ins and outs of a place and use a good search engine to quickly get an idea of the many layers of meaning attributed to a place.

Conclusion: (refuse to) look into the void

If places and people tell you their story, can you ignore it? And what, ultimately, is your role: to reproduce the structures that made the gap in the first place, or to build something better? This is not a rhetorical question. It is two design briefs. And you are already choosing between one or another every time you (refuse to) look into the void.