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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 179

users are taken into account, goal-directed rationality breaks up into much more
complex patterns of interchange. This is equally true of the carefully streamlined shop-
ping environments, as soon as people start inhabiting them. It is also true of city plan-
ning at large, and Solna Centre clearly combines features from both shopping centres
and urban centres.
Walter Benjamin depicted how city planners had already tried to tame and control
9
the chaotic city and its inhabitants in the nineteenth century. ‘Haussmannization’
hit Paris when Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, the prefect of Emperor Napoleon
III, reconstructed the city in 1852–70, creating a geometric structure of boulevards,
parks and ‘pleasure grounds’. This transparent city planning answered several
demands: hygienic, economic, as well as political. Benjamin showed how the modern
project was constantly undermined by its own unconscious dreams – the other,
magical shadow of its rational and enlightened side. ‘Arcades are houses or passages
having no outside – like the dream,’ he argued. ‘These gateways – the entrances to
the arcades – are thresholds’, leading down to dark, secret and labyrinthine worlds
connected to the collective unconscious of the masses, ‘the dreaming collective,
which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides’. 10 In Benjamin’s world
of ideas, a map over the city should therefore not only reconstruct streets, churches
and houses, but also ‘the more secret, more deeply embedded figures of the city:
murders and rebellions, the bloody knots in the network of the streets, lairs of love,
and conflagrations’. 11 In fact, the modern dream of transparent rationality has a
double shadow, both in the form of these secret dark elements that linger on in the
interstices of the Haussmannized city, and in the fact that this dream of transparency
is itself a kind of magic, materially inscribed in institutional practices of construction
and panoptic surveillance, but nonetheless filled with unconscious desires of omnipo-
tent control and purity.
For Michel de Certeau, too, the modern city is more unpredictable than the plan-
ners and those in power want to admit: ‘Beneath the discourses that ideologize the
city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable proliferate; without
points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are
impossible to administer.’ 12 Benjamin’s and de Certeau’s ideas of how power is built
into the urban environment feel highly relevant for a shopping centre like Solna
Centre, as does the latter’s ideas of how pockets of resistance are opened up within
such a strictly controlled place. At the end of Chapter 2, we mentioned how Michel
Foucault described the dispersed character and immanent relationship of power and
resistance. In spite of important differences, this approach has certain affinities to de
Certeau’s ideas of strategies of power and tactics of resistance. A shopping centre
tends to build such relationships into its very architecture and design, and while the
polarity does not so well describe the front lines discussed in the previous sections, it
seems to suit rather well when depicting the way in which individual visitors relate
to the centre’s management and shops.
While strategies ‘produce’ and ‘impose’, tactics ‘can only use, manipulate’. 13 (1)
Strategies have three specific traits. First, they tend to be spatially fixed, bound to

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