Page 198 - Consuming Media

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opposition to high culture in general. However, these front lines are less specific to
this particular environment, and it seems therefore more relevant to look at how
visitors/customers may react against the panoptic strategies of economic power, by
way of rudimentary forms of resistance to the commercial sphere of the centre and
its media retailers.
Power and resistance are mutually dependent on each other, and the counterpart
to the regulating measures may therefore simultaneously also point at embryonic
forms of resistance. The security officers in Solna Centre unofficially believed that
youngsters and gypsies were particularly prone to shoplifting; it may therefore also be
argued, in the reverse direction, that young people and certain ethnic groups either
have forms of practice that are not tolerated by the centre, and that may in them-
selves be understood as forms of symbolic resistance to these groups’ subordinate
positions in society, or that perhaps in response to the prejudiced suspicion of the
centre staff, they had to develop counteracting tactics of various kinds, including
simply staying away from the place.
Senior citizens and shop owners also quarrelled about the number of benches for
resting. During one period, bench after bench was removed from the centre, as a
deliberate strategy to keep customers moving, exposed to the temptations of the
shops. The official explanation was that benches with resting visitors would block the
view of the shops and their advertising. Solna’s senior citizen association, with 850
members, strongly protested against the lack of free sitting facilities: ‘We do not want
to sneak a seat in the many cafés, and we neither should nor can stand eating ice-
cream, pizza, or having a coffee and a cake each time we need to sit down and rest
our old bodies,’ they complained in a letter to the city council. Assisted by the
ombudsman for disabled persons, they won that struggle. The centre management
obviously didn’t dare to go against one of their most rapidly growing groups of
customers.
The centre management was considerably less interested in caring for the rights of
free expression. This caused a more explicit form of resistance, as public and political
debates sporadically occurred concerning the amount of freedom of expression for
non-commercial organizations on the squares and streets that had been made indoor
spaces with the adding of a glass roof in 1989. This front line related not only to the
formal regulations, but also to the practices and rules concerning how to use the few
premises existing for meetings in the place. Even the Lutheran Church had difficul-
ties obtaining access to meeting facilities, since taxation reasons made the centre
unwilling to rent them and other NGOs the available meeting areas. In December
2003, this made the church organize an open hearing on ‘the power over public
space’, to which they invited the Bishop of Stockholm, the managing director of
Rodamco Sweden, the conservative chair of the local council and the Swedish state
minister for culture. At this hearing, the Rodamco managing director ensured that
they could willingly supply meeting premises for the church and other NGOs, but
that the local authorities should then pay the rent costs. The council chair responded
that in that case they could not rent such premises in Solna Centre, since they were

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