Indeed, I've been in airports where I had to go down a long and eerily empty hallway, and I assumed it was just a design work-around due to needing to get a tiny number of people from A to B without breaking the security and safety perimeter. Without that security need, e.g., in a regular city, that hallway would be replaced with walking a block or two outdoors.

> I'm currently in Paris so I've seen a ton of metro stations recently and really, unless you arrived in the dead of night so that you could snap an empty photo like the one in the article, there's nothing much liminal about them.

Liminal does not mean minimal. It means in-between, neither here nor there but in the interstices, transitional.

Dictionary.app in macOS Sequoia defines (with example usage) "liminal" as

  > 1 occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold: I was in the liminal space between past and present | the paintings in this exhibition are the result of recent investigation into liminal states.

  > 2 relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process: that liminal period when a child is old enough to begin following basic rules but is still too young to do so consistently.

But the abandonment of a place which should be filled with life is a huge aspect of the liminal art movement. It speaks to the hollowing out of public life in north america and britain.

Unless all those people are transfixed into their own isolated, smartphone-mediated experience, as they are likely to be these days, then it's arguably "liminal" again. I.e. a lonely, deserted and uncanny place.

A Nina Simone song comes to mind: everyone's gone... to the moon...