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even photographed with the trophy. Such an event, because of its popularity, never-
theless runs the risk of keeping buying customers away from the mall. This was the
case with the afternoon of children’s entertainment when ‘Bananas in Pyjamas’
performed, and the shopping centre management decided to limit future such
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events. Once used to draw customers to Solna Centre, these local performances and
events have since disappeared from the shopping centre’s home page.
A complementary communicative aspiration for contemporary shopping environ-
ments is to market themselves as arenas where memorable experiences take place. The
late-modern rhetoric of the ‘experience economy’ engages a wide set of ‘creative
industries’ that think of themselves as producing and marketing experiences rather
than products or services. 26 This implies a culturalization of the economy, in the
form of an aestheticization of marketing practices, but it also indicates a correspon-
ding economization of culture and a commercialization of artistic practices. Both
high-tech and nostalgic styles can be drawn into that process. In recent years, hardly
any shopping ad text can be found that does not include some variant of words like
‘experience’, ‘feel’, ‘explore’, ‘discover’ or ‘event’. It was by no coincidence that one of
the slogans we found was: ‘Solna Centre – the centre of events!’ Another expanding
centre in the Stockholm region, Kista Centre, has a similar slogan on its website:
‘Experience Sweden’s smallest metropolis!’ What is communicated is an invitation to
a place that combines the receiving appropriation of shopping with an emotional
subjective intensity exceeding the cool rationality of pure purchase and consumption.
One such event was the official opening of the new section of the Solna Centre,
held in August 2001. The ceremony established the shopping centre’s relationship to
place as simultaneously local and transnational. This construction was accomplished
differently by different participants in the event, however. In the speeches held by the
centre’s manager, the town mayor and the visiting Swedish CEO, Solna Centre’s
success was described as resulting from local government’s cooperation with transna-
tional corporate structures. 27 For one local resident we interviewed about the
opening, it was not the ceremony but the entertainment that provided the link
between this local context and distant places. Because she recognized aspects of the
event – forms of music, dance and performance – from her travels abroad, she saw
these imports from afar as enriching the local, the place where she lived.
As many of these examples illustrate, there is no clear distinction between local and
transnational or global phenomena in the space of the shopping centre. The slogan
which invites visitors to ‘feel at home’ in Solna Centre is formed as an invitation into
a social, domesticated space. Yet the space of the mall has more in common with
other commercial spaces – regionally, nationally and transnationally – than with the
private space of home and family. It is not difficult to locate signifiers of the shop-
ping centre’s geographic location, if one knows where and how to look. But these
recede into the past, losing their currency as the mall becomes reconfigured according
to a norm that is determined elsewhere and nowhere. Like the faces of the mall
employees who smile down on visitors from the banners hanging from the glass roof,
they no longer represent themselves. They are serving a constitutive function, the