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152 Consuming Media

process of interaction between selves and others. And the different kinds of identifi-
cations mirror each other. ‘People and places script each other,’ as Ash Amin and
Nigel Thrift put it. 19 Physical sites and cities are read and named by people who in
turn are identified with these places. Solna Centre is interpreted by its manager, shop
owners and customers, who simultaneously also place themselves there, borrowing
parts of their individual and collective identities from this particular location, and
being mapped and labelled as ‘Solna people’ by political and commercial practices, in
a circular process.

FROM LOCAL TO TRANSNATIONAL SPACE
In previous chapters we have described how Solna Centre, dating from 1965, was
glassed over in 1989 and subsequently extended in 2001 to enclose additional shops
and the local hotel. This expansion was largely possible because of the commercial
success of the centre, and a long cooperation between the Solna city council and the
Swedish investment company Piren, which paved the way for corporate ownership of
increasing segments of the city centre. By 1989, the City Hall and the local library
remained the only municipally owned properties in what had previously been an
urban mix of commercial and public space. Solna Centre was in turn one of a large
number of shopping centres in the Stockholm region owned by the same investment
company. As the marketing and advertising campaigns of these malls were increas-
ingly integrated, Solna Centre attained in a sense a more ‘regional’ profile. In the year
2000, Piren was bought out by Rodamco, a multinational corporation with head-
quarters in the Netherlands. Solna Centre has thereby undergone a series of devel-
opments that make it a textbook example of the transformation from community
control and local ownership to being increasingly subjected to the expanding inter-
ests of ever more distant centres of power and control. In Lash and Urry’s terms, this
transformation renders the community no longer sovereign. 20
As the ownership of the land on which the shopping centre was located shifted,
the shops and brands represented in the mall also changed. Individual shop owners
who could not afford the rent increases nor meet the management’s demands for
longer and standardized opening hours vacated their spaces, and national and
transnational chains moved in. Exceptions included the family owned newsagents
and the several cafés located in the open ‘street’ down the centre of the mall which
appeared to maintain a stable business and clientele despite competition from the
two McDonalds. National and international brands and their logos took over larger
segments of the buildings’ façades, often against the protests of local interests who
argued for less commercialized uses of the space.
The aggregation of transnational influence in the space of Solna Centre has not,
however, replaced all traces of the local. The wall murals with their specific references
to local places and events remain, even if many of them are overshadowed by the large
colourfull graphics of brand names. There is still the painting of a camera filming
Greta Garbo, referencing the nearby studios of Film City (Filmstaden), once the
cradle of Sweden’s proud film industry. And the line of soccer players remains as a