Page 164 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 151

In Chapter 1, we mentioned the Solna Centre ad that placed a young family on a
living-room sofa in the middle of the centre, with the slogan ‘Feel at home in Solna
Centre’. The image recalls Benjamin’s comparison of city and home spaces, where he
likens the arcade to the drawing room: ‘More than anywhere else, the street reveals
itself in the arcade as the furnished and familiar interior of the masses.’ 17 Solna
Centre’s campaigns connected to the homey feeling as a means to create the safety
required for maximal consumption but also to foster an emotional identification with
the centre.
The management also saw Solna as a particularly ‘popular’ centre. The first
manager we interviewed had a kind of essentialist perception of the centre as an
organism with a pre-existing soul to which all commercial efforts had to adjust in
order to be maximally successful. His task was therefore to discover the unique char-
acter of his centre, referring not to the building as such, but rather to the people who
filled it. As Solna was populated by a rather average set of Swedes, the centre had to
make itself ‘ordinary’, accessible, middle-of-the-road, neither snobbish nor sluggish.
Ideas of authenticity were crucial for the manager, as he detested how some other
centres were abstractly constructed from nothihg, and instead expressed a deep fond-
ness for the sometimes troublesome popular ‘soul’ of his centre, to which he had to
adjust. This idea of authenticity was legitimated by loose references to the specific
history of Solna city, which appears to be infused into the walls of the centre, as well
as painted on them.
These aspects of the shopping centre have parallels in the way each mass medium
and text communicates its identity – its style and genre. Just as Solna Centre projects
its specific self-image through a wide set of communicative tools, so does any record
company or weekly magazine. In the other direction, this also parallels the manner
in which cities are identified through complexly evolving sets of markers: names,
slogans, monuments, rituals and accidental or engineered events. Together with other
political, economic and cultural factors, a wide range of media texts contributes to
make certain places into ‘hot spots’ for both social practices and symbolic represen-
tations. The production of urban centrality can be set in motion by a combination
of dramatic events, performances and conflicts, a constantly evolving set of collective
rituals, social practices and textual representations that reproduce the centrality of
city sites. The representation and construction of place is a central theme in a period
of ‘glocalization’, where global flows mix with localized ‘place identities’. 18 The
double image of the city as specific and universal is mediated through monuments,
guidebooks, news reports, works of art, songs, poetry, novels and other narratives,
artefacts and images. In such processes, media, consumption and urbanity work
together, as media events are strong attractors for shopping centres as well as for city
centres, and media texts offer representations of place identities.
These place identities are not just scripted ‘from above’, by management and
politicians. They are the result of a negotiation between many different groups and
interests, including inhabitants from ‘within’ and ‘below’, as well as from visitors and
strangers from ‘outside’. Identification – of people as well as of places – is always a

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