During recent decades, consumption-oriented spaces of comfort and hospitality have proliferated, including, for instance, lounge shopping malls, food court plazas, spas, entertainment retail, visitor centres and the development of ever-larger pedestrian precincts. In this article we explore shopping malls as capitalist domes in Sloterdijk's sense. We observe atmospheric production, atmospheric management and atmospheric culture (which we propose to call atmoculture) inside such domes.

The infamous idea that the area east of the borders of the German Reich be a “space without a people” imposing itself for occupation by “a people without space” accounts for the ominously looming convictions of German Geopolitics during the years of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. This contribution attributes the conception of the so called “German East” as uncultivated “slavic sahara” or “desert” to 19th Century novels and reads geopolitical classics as continuation of this literature.

This article argues for a spatial research methodology to better understand the interplay of inequality, intersectionality and age(ing). Drawing on places such as nursing homes or housing projects, the article scrutinizes the negotiation of old age in different spatial contexts, and how this is linked to other markers of difference, e.g. gender or ethnicity. On a larger scale, the article points to the potential of a spatial methodology to approach the complexity of intersectionality.