#since ontological security means something different in geog than it does in other academic spheres

[communistkenobi]

I think when people describe dark hallways or all-grey office cubicles as “liminal,” they’re using it as a synonym for creepy, which is not really accurate. What’s being reached for is a sense of dislocation, of being in a place that is not meant for you or is otherwise hostile to you in some way. “Liminal” is limited in its ability to describe those feelings, because the word is typically meant to refer to a place that exists only to get you somewhere else (like an airport, for example, or an interstate highway). “Liminal” isn’t synonymous with “a place of horror,” but I think it’s become that in the tumblr lexicon.

I think a much more robust term for what people are trying to describe is ontological (in)security. Ontological security in geographic scholarship means “a confidence that the world exists as it appears to be.” To give a very basic example, there are handles on doors because the function of a door is to act as a gateway to another space, and the handle is there to open that gateway. You trust that doors with handles are meant to be open and stepped through, and you also trust that door handles will always be placed at a standing person’s waist height - if you’ve ever seen a character try to open a door that leads nowhere in a story, it’s playing with your ontological security. Likewise, you see a flight of stairs and understand implicitly that it exists to facilitate pedestrian traffic to and from a specific place. It’s not a place to have a party with your friends, and you wouldn’t think to go to a stairwell to socialise.

To be ontologically insecure, on the other hand, is to exist in a place that is built for purposes that are not available to you. This is most commonly used in disability scholarship to refer to inaccessible entrances or stairwells - these things exist for able-bodied people only, and the structure of the built environment is now acting as a mechanism to divide people into groups who can use the space and groups who cannot. This is part of the way that ableism essentialises disability, which is then reproduced in the built environment - urban structures are taken as neutral, and if you can’t navigate them effectively, something is wrong with you individually (which of course is not true).

But this idea can be deployed for a variety of contexts - suburbs once built for the wealthy car-driving middle class typically do not have sidewalks in them. And now in many places in North America, suburbs are being inhabited by much poorer families (who are much less likely to own a vehicle), who are being driven out of the city core because now that same wealthy middle class has decided a condo is more fashionable than a detached house. This leaves people to live in places that aren’t built “for them,” to walk in the middle of roads or on lawns because there’s no space for them to walk, forcing them into hostile situations to either be hit by cars or yelled at by neighbours for walking on their grass. These spaces produce ontological insecurity, a sense that you are inhabiting a place that is not meant for you, and because of this you are frequently made less safe as a result.

This is where the critique that cities are structurally ableist, or racist, or misogynistic comes from. Urban environments are usually built by the ruling class, whose interests and aesthetic sensibilities get reproduced in the roads they build and houses they erect, and if you don’t happen to fit the profile of the ruling class (ie most people), some parts of a city are always going to be less safe for you. This is why in extremely spread-out, low density cities (LA for example), public transit is difficult to implement on a structural level (on top of all the political pushback), because these spaces are structured in such a way to be hostile to certain modes of travel or behaviour (eg any mode of transit that isn’t a car). They are built for a specific ideal archetype of person, and if you don’t fit into that, you’re much less safe and much less secure.

So if you want to use this in fantasy settings or horror or whatever, you need to approach the built environment as a historical process the same way that a government or law is. Office spaces are not “liminal,” but they can be sites of horror because their physical structure compels certain modes of social behaviour, and trying to work against that grain can make you feel “out of place” - i.e., ontologically insecure.