This thesis is a historical examination of the shopping space Gallerian in Stockholm, which opened in October of 1976. The text analyzes how Gallerian’s affective environment was staged. I show how the developers sought to use Gallerian to shape the space of the inner city to increasingly provide for movements through which spontaneous consumption arose as a natural affective response. By analyzing this ambition, I point to the relevance of studying this specific form of consumption space, an indoor street, as a space that differs from a department store or a shopping center outside of the city. The indoor street was motivated by historical actors precisely because it offered possibilities of affect-governance that a department store or a shopping center outside of the city could not. Furthermore, the text examines the affective culture created in the interior space of Gallerian. I show how escalators, vegetation embellishments and air- and temperature regulation became relevant in Gallerian’s ambition to create a certain affective pull into its space. This affective pull is similar to what Walter Benjamin examined in 19th Century Paris, but, as shown in the thesis, the affective pull of Gallerian was aiming to capture a broader crowd of flaneurs. Gallerian was marketed as an enabler of an inclusive and democratic flaneurship. Gallerian also worked on dissociating itself from consumption, by incorporating symbols and places into the shopping space which read as non-commercial, and by framing the space as a non-commercial experience in public discourse. I argue that Gallerian’s affective environment provided for a consumer subjectivity that was potential, by staging an indoor street that naturalized shopping as part of the walk-about through the city as well as providing an interior environment with a certain affective pull. Lastly, I analyze how Gallerian achieved symbolic meaning as a place in the city. It became a “thing- world”, in Adorno’s and Benjamin’s sense, in that it was filled with desire for commodities, but also through a voyeuristic experience of other people as a conjurer of fantasies. I also argue that Gallerian, as a lived place-based experience, became a place where historical consciousness could be conjured and a longing for a city of the past could be enacted in the space.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-503602 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Sjödin, Arvid |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för idé- och lärdomshistoria |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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