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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 163

critical possibility of actualizing Solna Centre as a social space for enacting the local
identity and team loyalty, a tie that has a symbiotic economic advantage for local
merchants, chain stores and the team itself (assuming the event- marketing equation
remains weighted on the marketing side and the event does not get out of hand.) On
face value, the history of Swedish film production would appear to have a more
‘authentic’ connection to the town of Solna. Early films were after all actually made
on the site of Film City, whereas the soccer team has a forty-year history prior to its
move to Råsunda Stadium. This affirms Appadurai’s distinction between local
knowledge and the production of locality, and shows that geographic proximity must
be made meaningful by the active production of a social dimension, in this case by
fandom. Only when Solna Centre becomes a social space does it emerge as local.
These instances become less frequent as events in the shopping centre refer less often
to a local context, and as centres of power and control became increasingly distant
from the local community. The local survives as a series of fading paintings, signs that
become less meaningful as they recede from memory.

BECOMING TRANSLOCAL
Our sports example illustrated the strength of local ties, whereas the film example
showed the importance of transient flows. All media and people in practice have to
combine these two aspects. This is true for all media circuits, and it is also a neces-
sary condition for the lives of the centre’s visitors as well as of its staff. As mentioned
above, the first manager of Solna Centre was enchanted by the ‘soul’ of his centre, to
which he felt a strong but ambivalent tie, at once respectful of its authenticity and
irritated by its stubbornness. His successor was brought in from a previous position
at the Eurostop Halmstad centre in another part of Sweden. He was a newcomer to
Solna and thus had not yet any personal relationship to the place. However, he
moved into an apartment in the centre itself, and soon become an integrated inhab-
itant of Solna. Yet he saw his career as a series of moves upwards and outwards,
perhaps to work for Rodamco somewhere else in Europe. The company typically
moves its staff to where their qualifications and experience are needed, without regard
for where they are from or their connection to the locale. As the manager of Solna
Centre, he was supposed to represent its core values, but simultaneously was one of
the more ‘transient’ persons we encountered. Through his accumulated experience of
inhabiting and managing the centre, he also became quickly entangled in its local
networks, and the fact that he was still there years after testifies to the inescapable
balance all people have to strike between local links and transient flows.
Cultural production is never exclusively place specific, but is increasingly accom-
plished in situations where global and local dimensions of place are present simulta-
neously. The movement and permeability that characterize contemporary cultural
phenomena have provoked theorists into new ways of thinking about place, in par-
ticular how people relate to place differently today than they once did. Appadurai was
among the first to link migration and media as the two principal factors accounting
for the contemporary plasticity of people’s conceptions of place and changing notions

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