Thought Experiment: What happens if we treat spacetime exactly the same way that we treat emergent quantum fields?

This is a fun (at least to me) thought experiment inspired by emergent gravity and condensed-matter analogies.

What happens if we treat spacetime exactly the same way we treat emergent quantum fields, i.e., as the large-scale, phase-dependent behavior of deeper microscopic quantum degrees of freedom?

In this framing, spacetime isn’t a fundamental field to be quantized. Instead, it would be the emergent phase of some underlying quantum field(s), the same way superfluidity, crystal structure, or gauge fields can emerge from deeper quantum systems. The smooth 4D geometry we observe would be one stable phase of those underlying degrees of freedom. The metric would then be the coarse-grained variable describing that phase’s large-scale structure, and general relativity would describe the large-scale behavior of that emergent phase, much like hydrodynamics or elasticity describe the large-scale behavior of ordinary emergent fields.

Meanwhile, quantum mechanics would describe the microscopic degrees of freedom that give rise to the spacetime phase in the first place.

I’d love to be pointed toward any existing approaches that explicitly treat spacetime as an emergent field with phases, correlation lengths, order parameters, excitation spectra, etc., rather than as a fundamental field or fixed background structure.

I’m not proposing a new theory, I’m just trying to understand where this perspective appears in the literature or how close existing frameworks get to it.

Any pointers would be appreciated, as they will help me to continue exploring this thought experiment.