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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 153

reminder that Stockholm’s largest stadium lies just across the street. The imposing
Hollywood Stairs is a central architectural feature of the shopping centre, intended
by the architect as a double reference both to Solna’s importance to the Swedish film
industry and to the wide staircase in the Stockholm City Hall which the Nobel prize
winners descend each December.
As the mall has expanded around them, these and other features built into Solna
Centre in the late 1980s have lost their prominence. It is further not likely that they
have retained the specificity of their references to Solna that they once had for mall
visitors. They now belong to the older and less flashy part of the mall. The recent
expansion is far grander and more spacious, and makes no pretension of locality.
There is a broader staircase, which leads nowhere but forms an excellent arena for
various performances and events, and a wide, bright passage from the new entrance,
connecting the original shopping centre to the hotel. This new space is devoid of
details that would detract from the expanse of shop window that line each side. It is
difficult not to interpret the latest renovation and expansion as an expression of Solna
Centre’s place within a transnational enterprise. Structural and visual reminders of
this shopping centre’s relationship to a specific geographic and demographic place on
the outskirts of Stockholm survive primarily as archaic references to the past.
A few steps from the bench where Ronald McDonald sits cross-legged looking out
on passers-by is the entrance to the municipal library, where we find a stark contrast
to the transnational character dominating major sections of Solna Centre. On the
wall opposite the library’s checkout desk hangs a large tapestry depicting Hagalund,
the neighbourhood most closely associated with Solna. Passing the tapestry and
turning right, the visitor enters a small gallery where a range of work is exhibited. The
exhibits, which are changed at regular intervals, have included the work of school
classes, evening art classes and local artists working in a range of media. Another
popular exhibit was a series of historical photographs of Solna. The primary require-
ment for displaying work is that it has a connection to the community. A documen-
tary photographic exhibit on Black Army, the controversial supporter club of a
national league soccer team, was displayed here: a link to Solna’s ‘home team’. Not
surprisingly for a municipal library, there is also a collection of reference works about
the town, and at one time a small collection of historic postcards could be purchased
at the checkout desk. The library is not only local, of course; its collections of books,
periodicals, records and videos, and its Internet access, provide visitors with the
means of transcending the local community – a point to which we return in our
consideration of translocal media use. Here the point is that the library looks as it
does to a large extent because it is located in Solna. At other sites of media consump-
tion throughout the shopping centre, including bookstores, newsagents, video rental
shops and card shops, the goods are much the same as those found in other shopping
centres across Sweden, packaged and presented to a great extent like similar goods in
similar environments around the globe.
Geographically, Solna Centre is neither global nor local. Rather, it is constituted
through a successive layering of references to specific places, both near and far, and

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