Konsumtionens sociala ingenjörskonst

Kampanjen för shoppingcentret under efterkrigstidens Sverige

Abstract

In 1955, one of Sweden’s earliest indoor shopping centers opened in the city of Luleå. The shopping center formula was widely debated in Swedish industry press in the 1950s, and the developers of the Luleå center launched an intense campaign for shopping centers as a selling-technology in the years after it opened. Investigating this campaign, this article analyzes the planning rationalities that were attached to the shopping center as it rose to prominence in the 1950s and suggests the term consumer engineering to understand them. I show how the shopping center formula rose out of a disbelief in the free market as steering logic for organizing consumer practices in a city. Old ways of physically organizing stores were deemed obsolete and insufficient, and unfit for planning consumer practices “rationally”. In light of this, the shopping center formula was argued to enable new and increased forms of expert planning of the behaviors and desires of consumers, from experts who could model the consumer experience on research into consumer behavior and consumer psychology. Thus, the campaign for shopping centers in Sweden was centered around making Swedish retailers embrace the planning rationality of the shopping center. In the literature on Swedish social engineering, it is often taken for granted that social engineering was primarily a statist undertaking aiming to shape the private life. In this article I investigate another side of these governing rationalities, and show how imperatives of subverting an unplanned free market in favor of expert-led planning also came from the market itself.