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tension between on the one hand the local context, where we find a shopping centre
located in the town of Solna with its specific history, and on the other hand its
economic dependence and structural relationship to transnational organizations with
centres far removed from this locale. Secondly, this dimension has implications for
Solna Centre’s social character, where public and private uses of space are intertwined
at the same time that they are strictly regulated. A shopping centre is undeniably a
public space, yet private commercial interests exert an increasing influence on its
form and use. It is further a public space that borrows and shares many characteris-
tics of the domestic and intimate spheres of home and family. Whereas in Chapter 1
we considered the history of Solna Centre and the implications the rewritings of
history have had on the identities of the shopping centre and the people who pass
through it, here the focus is on the local and transnational dimensions of this place.
Before entering the shopping centre, however, we begin the chapter with a general
overview over some basic coordinates of media spatiality, parallel to what was said on
temporality in the previous chapter, but moving more rapidly towards the commu-
nicating spaces of the shopping centre. We then continue by examining the complex
mix of diverse geographies and social dimensions of place manifested in Solna
Centre. This forms the background for a more detailed examination of two
phenomena – football and film – both closely identified with the town of Solna, and
we look at how these two forms of popular entertainment have been caught up in
transnational developments, transforming their relationship to Solna Centre in
distinctly different ways. In the final section we return to considerations of media and
their social uses as a means of both confirming and transcending place, specifically
how people change their relationship to the place where they are through their uses
of media. At that point we also use some ideas from Paul Ricoeur to connect back to
the temporal dimension of the previous chapter, showing how time and space are
interlaced in media and cultural practices.
MEDIATING SPACE
The previous chapter went into some detail to discuss the multidimensionality of
time experience and its relations to mediation and narrative of history and fiction.
There is a strong parallelism between the dimensions of time and space, and analo-
gous arguments could therefore be made about the general phenomenology of spatial
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experience. It is for instance useful to make a distinction between, on the one hand,
abstract geometric space as a system of linked ‘sites’ and, on the other, the concrete
lived spatiality of ‘places’. Paul Ricoeur points at a ‘kinship between memories and
places’, indicated by the linked phenomena of dating and localization that testify to
‘the inseparable tie between the problematics of time and space’, and sees the ‘act of
inhabiting’ as ‘the strongest human tie between the date and the place’, where the
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date is the lived temporality just as the place is the lived spatiality. Just like histor-
ical time results from the intersection of objective time and lived time, so does
geographic space result from the joining of geometrical space and lived space. There
is a chronotopic ‘system of places and dates’ that frame all the events and actions in