The creative power of non-places

We design places carefully. We give them meaning, function, and intentionality. We make them into something we can inhabit. Spaces where we can linger. Placemaking, we call it. But in between all of these places, there is something else.

In the old folk tales, danger always looms when transitioning from one space to another. For example, the young girl leaves her childhood home and comes to a bridge on her way to her new home and role as a grown woman and wife. There might be a troll underneath that bridge, or the river people may cast a spell on you as you pass the bridge, whisking you away to their underwater world, not to be seen again for a hundred years.

The French anthropologist Marc Augé has coined the modern equivalent of such liminal spaces. “Non-places”, he calls it – defining transient spaces, such as supermarkets, airports, railway stations, or even the interiors of planes and trains. These places lack a sense of identity, history, or enduring relationship.

However, as non-places remove us from our usual context, they also create a vacuum of roles, expected social cues, and historical narratives, freeing the mind to wander down paths not trodden by habit.

At the beginning of Hans Christian Andersen’s travelogue, In Spain (I Spanien, 1863), there is a fantastic description of the creative power of the non-place. Andersen is traveling with a stagecoach and is about to enter Spain:

I got a place in the coupé, with a lady and her daughter, both Spaniards, and with enormously large crinolines: if they had gone to Skagen, the mother alone would have covered the whole of the northern part of the little promontory. I felt as if I sat by the side of a balloon that was being inflated.

The postilions cracked their whips, and we set off, swinging from side to side in the narrow streets, cut over the drawbridge, through the fortifications—environs that might be painted as theatrical scenery for a drama of the Middle Ages. At last the wide open high road lay before us. The Señora was asleep; she was dreaming, probably, of her beautiful Spain, where she had loved, and been loved, for she had a daughter. I also dreamt of Spain—dreamt with open eyes and waking thoughts, wondering what might turn up for me.

The daughter neither slept nor dreamt, but all her thoughts seemed to be centred in a small sac de nuit, or large knitted bag, which she held in her lap; she was constantly lifting it and moving it, and I was quite annoyed by it, after I had become accustomed to the crinoline.

What could there be in that bag, and what might there be on the other side of the Pyrenees? These two thoughts lay strangely coupled together in my mind.
(In Spain, 1864, transl. By Mrs. Bushby)

Enclosed by strangers, embraced by anonymity, and set adrift in a transitional realm, on roads unrolling toward the horizon, his mind roams more freely. As Augé suggests, such non-places allow us to shed our usual markers, and in that intangible space, Andersen’s sensory and imaginative faculties ignite. Here, tethered neither to the old nor quite arrived at the new, the traveler becomes an observer, a dreamer, and – ultimately – a creator.

While Marc Augé’s non-places are often surrounded by moments of hassle – security check-ins, ticketing, and so forth, it is almost as if these annoying tasks act as transitional devices, shedding us of our roles and allowing us to mentally as well as physically enter the zones of transit existing outside of our normal realm of existence. And while our stay in such non-places often is disregarded as forgettable backdrops in our lives, these fleeting spaces hold, as Andersen demonstrates, great creative potential.

This is because such spaces can nurture what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called “flow“: a state of deep immersion in which we lose track of time, feel liberated from daily pressures, and become intensely focused on the here and now.

It is tempting to actively design non-places that intentionally stimulate creativity. However, the very quality of the non-place is that it does not intentionally engage with us. Therefore, the designer of such places has to be very careful not to impose meaning and intention into the design. Instead of designing the actual non-places, the designer might focus on designing around them: The thresholds, the backdrop, the openness of experience, which all work together to facilitate freeing the mind to wander.

In Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan, there is a beautiful example of how a non-place is transformed into an experience in itself: Seiryu Miharashi Station is a train station without an exit. Its sole purpose is to allow passengers to step off the train and simply take in the natural surroundings for a while. This is a literal “pause place” – not a destination, but a designed interruption in the journey.

Likewise, much ambient music serves a similar purpose, acting like a backdrop for the mind’s free exploration. It is no coincidence that Brian Eno – arguably the father of ambient music – coined one of his first endeavors in the genre “Music for Airports.”

Today, you can find numerous examples of digital offerings that design non-place environments aimed at stimulating creativity and productivity through calming visuals and sounds. And workplace designers increasingly understand that the nooks, alcoves, or lounges that are not for focused work, but for unstructured time, are as important as the actual work area.

Such designed offerings tend to fall short. Most often, non-places cease to be non-places when they are intentionally designed for an unstructured experience, simply because the very act of intentionality imposes structure, meaning, and expectation. The magic of the non-place lies in its ambiguity and openness. When we try too hard to curate the experience, we risk closing off the very possibilities we design for.

However, the train ride, the airport wait, even sitting in the telephone queue! There is truly unique potential in such forms of unstructured time. Such non-places can be sites of radical possibility rather than sterile voids – not just liminal or in-between, but spaces where difference and change can emerge, precisely because they are undefined: Nowheres, free from the usual constrictions, where the mind can truly wander.