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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 147

lived space and lived time, a system further elaborated by the sciences of geography
7
and historiography. He traces ‘analogies and overlappings’ in the parallel workings
of ‘constructed’ space and ‘narrated’ time, arguing that inhabiting and constructing
are correlated in a third space of localities mediating between geometrical and lived
space, corresponding to the idea of a third time of history with the dates on the
calendar mediating between cosmic and lived time. This third space can be inter-
preted as ‘a geometrical checkering of lived space, like a superimposition of “places”
on the grid of localities’. 8
Reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s readings of nineteenth-century Paris as a text, as
well as of our own reading of Solna Centre, Ricoeur describes the particular rela-
tionships between space and time in the city:
Narrative and construction bring about a similar kind of inscription, the one in
the endurance of time, the other in the enduringness of materials. Each new
building is inscribed in urban space like a narrative within a setting of intertex-
tuality … The city gives itself as both to be seen and to be read. In it, narrated
time and inhabited space are more closely associated than they are in an isolated
building. 9
It is important to note that in modern societies, this combined narration of time and
inhabitation of space is normally mediated through communication technologies
that are used in everyday life to link subjective experiences to sociocultural commu-
nities. Ricoeur then offers the following condensation of his argument: ‘To the
dialectic of lived space, geometrical space and inhabited space corresponds a similar
dialectic of lived time, cosmic time and historical time. To the critical moment of
localization within the order of space corresponds that of dating within the order of
time.’ 10 Localization marks out certain nodes in space as special, linking them to
memories of social acts and symbolizing them in representations that invest sites with
meaning.
Before reading the urban space and inhabited places of a shopping centre, let us
first scrutinize how communication links media and space. The interplay between
people and media is always spatially contextualized, in spite of the inherent trans-
gressional character of communication. Places frame and delimit media uses, which
at the same time create spatial formations as meaningful geographic places and social
worlds. Media texts represent places and spaces, and afford them meaning. Media use
also creates social spaces through structuring interaction between humans and the
built environment. This is true of all media spaces, as they overlap shopping spaces
in particular and urban spaces in general. They are all spaces of communication and
consumption. 11

(1) First, all media use is spatially located, framed and determined. On the one hand,
there are material and technical limitations related to access of electricity, network
coverage, etc. Books and papers tend to dissolve under water and cannot be read in the
dark. Before transistors, lightweight batteries, microelectronics and the establishment of

Translocal Spaces 147