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its central square and streets were covered with a glass roof. In 1985, a nationally oper-
ating real estate company called Piren bought all the buildings around the square,
except for the public services. After extensive reconstructions, Solna Centre opened in
1989, transformed into a closed shopping centre, with rental space of more than
80,000 square metres. Today, its more than 100 shops, twenty-five eateries and one
hotel annually attract some 9 million visitors – as many as the whole Swedish popula-
tion, as the management proudly boasts, cunningly playing with statistics. There are
also offices and flats in the buildings. In 2000, the Dutch company Rodamco CE
acquired Piren and thus became the multinational owner of Solna Centre. Within this
centre, a wide range of media commodities are sold and used by an equally wide range
of people. Its specificities offer insights into increasingly global processes of space-
bound media practices. The particular Swedish welfare state and the broader social
history of Scandinavia supply conditions that are different from elsewhere. But each site
is also specific, and the specificities of this one turn out to be both fascinating and
instructive for the general themes to be developed here.
Solna Centre shares with other shopping centres all over the world many basic
aspects of media consumption spaces, including the interplay among malls, chains
and stores, as well as that among management, staff, customers and other visitors.
Video rentals and photo shops, libraries and bookshops, mobile phones and records,
journals and posters – none of these phenomena are unique to Solna or Sweden.
Solna Centre could in important respects be almost anywhere in the world. But it
also has its own specific context and history that make it particularly interesting to
have a closer look at. Its specific combination of public and private space offers
particularly enlightening insights into some of the contradictions of modern soci-
eties. Further, the rapid privatization and commercialization of major parts of the
Swedish welfare state structures also point to certain global trends.
This was our conviction when forming the Passages project. Our passages through
the labyrinths of media consumption explored superimposed layers of meaning and
power around the media commodities that were circulated, sold and used in a
contemporary shopping centre. The research has proceeded in a series of steps. The
first step was a theoretical overview of cultural perspectives on consumption and
media use. In a second step, we explored the shopping centre as a general media
space: its architecture, design and marketing, its visual display and aural soundscape,
its internal organization and the movements of its visitors. The third step led us into
its specific media shops, to see how they structured and sold their goods, and how
customers made choices and used what they bought there. In a fourth step, the
research group reflected upon methodological issues of collective media ethnog-
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raphy. This in brief is the unique collective process that made this book possible.
AMBIGUOUS SPACES
Shopping spaces have an intermediary character between the public and the private.
In contrast to the intimate familial sphere, they are relatively open and accessible
arenas, even as they are strictly controlled and regulated by private owners and

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