From Parisian Arcades to Everyday Life via Cultural Capitals

Walter Benjamin's collection of disparate citations and comments that was brought together under the title of Passages- or, better known as, Arcades-Project opens with a common-place description of Parisian arcades that he cites from a city guide from mid-nineteenth century. What catches Benjamin's attention is the names of the shops and establishments brought under the roof of the then novel form of urban space, that of arcades. Overwhelmingly, as he remarks, these names brought famous operetta plays of these days to mind with their frivolous, exotic and seductive titles. Just as, later on, Benjamin's work on shopping arcades in Paris was taken to be paradigmatic for research on different kinds of space, themselves compared to these arcades, one could follow Benjamin's associative lead to make a connection between these original spaces and Parisian operettas. Notably, Kracauer saw operettas as a genre paradigmatic of the epoch and the city, Paris, where they were created and have exerted their influence, not least on the imagination of the everyday life that the practices of these first shopping malls corroborate. To this day, European shopping malls, such as one built in 2004 in Weimar, Germany, bear a heavy cultural imprint of collective imaginary that they represent in their fusion of coffee-houses, decorative interiors, and cultural references, located, ironically, in the super-structure of that building.