Arvid Sjödin: “A social engineering of the marketplace: The campaign for shopping centers in postwar Sweden”

Abstract:

This chapter investigates the political ordering of walking consumer bodies in the Swedish postwar city through an examination of the inner-city shopping center. Particularly, the chapter analyzes a specific shopping center named Shopping, built in Luleå in 1955. The chapter shows how the shopping center was presented as a space for systematizing and ordering the movements of consumers when several modern developments made planners deem the free market as an unfit steering logic for planning an efficient and satisfactory consumer experience. The shopping center formula was presented as a way to systematically and “rationally” engineer this experience. Precisely because of the shopping center’s ability to control walking, it was also seen by marketing professionals as harboring unique opportunities for shaping and controlling consumer desires. Drawing on scholars studying consumer engineering, I interpret this systematic ordering of the walking consumer experience as a form of corporeal consumer engineering with connections to rational planning, urban sanitation and social engineering, arguing against a conventional view of engineering as a state enterprise aiming to shape the private life in the home. Contrary to much scholarship on inter- and postwar governance of pedestrians, often emphasizing the marginalization and “othering” of pedestrian movement, this chapter also shows attempts to rather control pedestrians through intensifying their body movements and, thus, their consumer desires.