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

and shape resembling the pattern of a city sidewalk. The soundscape was also impor-
tant to the architect’s concept of an urban environment, and he minimized features
that would muffle the sound of footsteps, voices, and other noise that is natural to a
city. His ideal was not the ambiance of the small town square or the city park that are
other common ‘themes’ in contemporary mall design, but an urban milieu where
commerce is integrated into the life of the street. 40 The rhythms of commerce also
follow roughly those of the street, from early morning deliveries (arriving around 9
a.m.) and the first elderly shoppers, to the more rapid tempo of mid-morning shop-
ping, peaking in the mix of employees and shoppers over lunchtime, followed by a
second peak starting at mid afternoon as young people get out of school and people
come through to shop on their way home from work.
It is, however, a street without the inconveniences of dirt and traffic, protected
from the weather. On a dark November afternoon, Solna Centre’s warm, light atmos-
phere of cheery hustle and bustle offers a welcoming respite from the cold and wet
weather outside. It is, in other words, a typical mall environment where ‘time of year,
time of day, regional location are all hidden, available only through the activities
41
going on in the mall’. The visual reminders of time and season follow the material
customs of seasonal decor and consumption – the Swedish customary Easter witches
hanging from the ceiling in March, banks of red poinsettias at Christmas, spring
clothing fashions in April – rather than exterior conditions of weather and climate.
It is never winter in Solna Centre.
Peter Jackson has described the contemporary retail environment, the shopping
mall, as a successful attempt to tame or ‘domesticate’ the street. 42 The danger of
crime in the contemporary urban street is frequently cited as a reason for creating
more easily regulated indoor shopping environments. Privatizing and enclosing
urban space is part of this process of domestication, of ‘making a “home” or familiar
place from what was previously foreign or hostile territory’. 43 Solna Centre’s history
and its slogan ‘Feel at home in Solna Centre’ stand in contrast to the city street. In
the ‘feel at home’ campaign, posters and ads for Solna Centre featured an image of
a young couple and child sitting cosily on a sofa placed in the middle of the shop-
ping space. The image, with its dislocation of domesticity, blurs the border between
public and private, at the same time that it makes deliberate use of the surprise effect
created by joining of these two disparate spheres. If the distinction between the
home and the shopping mall were not evident to most people, the image would be
pointless.
The ‘domestication’ of the shopping space includes an only slightly veiled reference
to woman as consumer, and must be viewed against the longer history of the depart-
ment store. That early predecessor to the shopping mall appealed directly to women,
as a number of researchers have pointed out. 44 The department store served as a
social and public space that was nevertheless safe for the middle-class woman. It
addresses the woman as consumer, simultaneously acknowledging her economic
power and cultural influence as arbiter of taste. Solna Centre’s statistics show that
seven out of ten of its visitors are women, a figure that fits with Miller’s studies of two

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