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in restrictions of the freedom of assembly and of demonstrations.’ This fear has been
repeatedly justified. Amnesty International and other NGOs have been denied the
right to place a table for information and books there, ‘because the property owner
did not accept political activities in that part of Solna Centre’, according to a social
democratic interpellation in 1988. The property owner said he didn’t want to make
the place a ‘refuge for ayatollahs and political pundits’. Soon, political parties were
also denied the right to have lotteries and information stands under the glass roof of
the municipal core site.
Paradoxically, several state regulations have supported the property owners in their
struggle to win power over public space. According to Swedish law, the area occupied
by Solna Centre is defined as a ‘common’ public place, although in practice it is only
a half-public space, since the state law and the local statutes leave room for the regu-
lations of the shopping centre to overrule the public regulations, motivated by the
fact that the municipality does not own the ground. These regulations are posted at
all entrances to the centre. Among other things, they explicitly state that it is
forbidden to advertise and organize demonstrations. Solna’s citizens may have lost
their town centre, but have gained a thriving shopping centre, just like millions of
people all around the world. Even though the political agencies seem to have capitu-
lated to economic power, some pockets of resistance do remain within the state
sphere. As mentioned above, they are primarily located among civil servants within
the cultural sector who tend to represent symbolic power.
The speeches of mutual admiration at the 2001 inauguration mentioned above
show how state and capitalist interests worked together to reconstruct increasing
parts of the city as a gigantic and thoroughly surveilled and planned shopping centre,
with total service for all inhabitants. Many towns and suburbs walk the same way.
This forces shops and visitors who do not fit in further and further away to marginal
places. Some welcome this development, others feel sorry about it, as when the
shopoholic Edina, during a visit to Paris in the British television comedy series
Absolutely Fabulous, sighed to her critical daughter Saffy, with a gesture of resignation:
‘The world is becoming a shopping centre – and you are looking for an exit?!’
Another Stockholm shopping centre, Kista Galleria, has been described as ‘a small
town, nicely wrapped up in a glass case’. ‘Inhabitants will simply never have to leave
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Kista, since all they can wish for and need will be there.’ Such are the visions for city
centres to be transformed into shopping centres.
Issues of communication relate to issues of public and communal versus private
and commercial space. The border between private and public is notoriously blurred,
and the precise rules for what is one allowed to do in the shopping centre were
unclear. Political manifestations are allowed on streets and squares in other city
centres, but hardly when these have been put under glass roofs and fenced in, with
doors locked at night. That would disturb business. The commercialization of public
space therefore clearly shifts the power balance in urban centres. Such developments
have provoked a growing awareness of the fragility and importance of public commu-
nication in society. When material space is transformed into pure consumption

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