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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 145

9. TRANSLOCAL SPACES

All shopping malls are alike, it is said. Rob Kroes has paraphrased the phenomenon,
1
‘If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall’. Considering that the proliferation of this
retail form in the United States alone (the so-called ‘malling of America’) reached an
astonishing 39,000 in last century’s final decade, it is not surprising that entering
2
Solna Centre feels like stepping into a place where one has been before. Even the
first-time visitor enters an environment that in many ways is already familiar. The
wide covered walkways, the mixture of daylight filtered through the glass roof with
the light from shop windows and signs, and the omnipresence of advertising logos
together form an indoor shopping space that is easily recognizable from elsewhere.
The common tendency to design the retail environment around a specific set of
themes (the town square, Main Street, etc.), paradoxically generalizes the shopping
centre even further by tying it to other themed retail environments, including not
only malls, but also restaurants, airports and tourist sites. Solna Centre’s narrow,
dimly lit Post Walk, designed to resemble the arcades of ‘old Europe’, and its main
walkway, with its large square floor tiles, street lamps and soundscape intended to
connote an urban street, are in fact reminders of other shopping centres across the
globe. 3
In this chapter we look more closely at Solna Centre as a place that is both local
and global, and specifically how these aspects of proximity and distance are layered
onto each other in the shopping centre. The concept of a ‘global place’ is a contra-
diction in terms, since globality is understood as precisely the opposite of the local,
rooted in a specific place. There are nevertheless specific places that cannot be char-
acterized without referring to processes that transgress local, regional and national
borders. Yet even these processes rarely encompass the entire globe, but follow previ-
ously established lines of power and communication as they link together people and
places across ever-greater distances. Hannerz has proposed substituting ‘transna-
tional’ for the term global, in order to keep in mind the varying scale and spread of
these border crossings. Despite the fact that the transnational can be a misleading
term for processes that often transcend the nation state, it has the advantage of being
somewhat more humble, and even more important, lacks the ideological baggage the
term globalization carries. Following Hannerz, we refer to the processes that connect
Solna Centre to an infinite array of elsewheres as transnational, although depending
on the context, we also find the global deeply inscribed in this shopping centre. 4
As touched upon in Chapter 1, the tension arising in the many-layered relation-
ships between local and global or transnational characteristics of contemporary spaces
of consumption has several dimensions. There is first a geographic dimension; and a