Promises of the past, promises for the future: On utopianism and commercial space
Nina Kivinen, Åbo Akademi University
Anna-Maria Murtola, Åbo Akademi University
When Walter Benjamin in his critique of capitalist modernity engaged with the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris he did so being drawn in two directions. On the one hand he saw the arcades as expressive of oppression through the ideology of consumption, but on the other hand he also saw them as possessing utopian promises of liberation, providing the port into the land of plenty (Rollason 2002). In this paper we juxtapose the utopianism of a contemporary shopping centre with the dreams and memories of consumption of former clients of an established old
department store.
The shopping centre called a ‘commercial city’, which recently opened to the public in regional Finland, could be conceived of as a descendant of the arcades of 19th century Paris. Apart from seeing the arcades as ‘dream houses of the collective’ (Benjamin 1999: 405) – places laden with promises of the future - he also recognized their function as ‘maximizing commodity consumption’ (Gilloch 2002). In the 20th century, this image of the shopping centre as the ‘most powerful and adaptable machine for consumption that the world has ever seen’ (ULI Institute 2005) has only been intensified.
The contemporary idea of the shopping centre with its clear connotations of suburbia, mass consumption and capitalism can be juxtaposed with the more historic department store. The department store was historically one of the first public spaces where women could move freely (Kortelainen, 2005). The department store can be seen as a space of freedom, dreams and hopes of the independent woman. The shopping experience provided a way to touch, smell and feel the things that perhaps were unachievable. Luxury goods and the latest gadgets as well as the beautiful items of leisure would be prominently displayed at central locations in major cities.
In a Finnish context the oldest and most prestigious department store is Stockmann in Helsinki, founded in 1862. To generations of Finns, Stockmann has been a place of dreams and hopes, where the latest inventions and the latest fashion were visible, but mainly out of reach. Today shopping at Stockmann’s has lost part of its glamour for a significant part of Finns, but by no means all.
In light of this our contemporary shopping centre exhibits some interesting features; for instance, a part of it is called the ‘Old Town’, and at the heart of it there is a ‘central park of events’, where various social and commercial activities take place. This central park could be conceived of as an expression of contemporary experience economy – providing bustle and excitement, spectacles for the masses. Here the promise of the new is strong, and there is a kind of utopianism of the future to be discerned; you can sense a will to be thrown into the future, unconditionally, regardless of its unknown character.
On the other hand, the ‘Old Town’, for instance, could be conceived of as an expression of another kind of a utopian aspiration, one that sees a better future in the past (e.g. Galloway 2006); a romantic utopianism of early capitalism as characterized by a sanitized idea of cosy market fairs where people gather for social purposes as well as for commercial ones, where the commercial is not (yet) seen as such a beast as portrayed in the description of the 20th century shopping centre above. Or, alternatively, a department store where you can peacefully wander around marvelling at the various items on display without any pressure of immediate commercial transaction.
Where the shopping centre is perhaps the space of egalitarian dreams of the future, the department store is the space of past hopes, nostalgia and a reminder of class and difference. Yet there is something provocatively seductive in the idea of past commercial space as compared to the contemporary. As our shopping centre example shows, there seems to be some kind of a longing for a nostalgic past. Through engaging with this past, with the memories of the Stockmann - department store and Benjamin’s writings on the arcades, we hope in this paper to be able to unwind what exactly such a past could be like, and why it seems so prominent in the context of a contemporary shopping centre.
References
Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project. Cambridge (MA): Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Galloway, A. (2006). “Warcraft and Utopia”. CTheory. Accessed at www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=507, 20.1.07.
Gilloch, G. (2002). Walter Benjamin. Critical Constellations. Cambridge: Polity Press
Kortelainen, Anna (2005) Päivä naisten paratiisissa. Helsinki: WSOY.
Rollason, C. (2002). “The Passageways of Paris: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Contemporary Cultural Debate in the West”. Accessed at http://www.wbenjamin.org/passageways.html, 20.1.07
ULI Institute (2005) / Beyard and O’Mara, et al. Shopping Center Development Handbook. Third ed. Washington, D.C.: ULI – the Urban Land Institute.