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.

Contemporary urban theory has less to say about internal processes of crowds for theoretical reflections on urbanity. The paper analyses the work on crowds by Peter Sloterdijk and the performative theory of assembly by Judith Butler to enrich contemporary thinking on urbanity in the South. The paper accentuates two arguments. Sloterdijk emphasises the `affective synthesis' of crowds, whereas Butler elaborates the performative effect of crowds to articulate the right of owning attested rights.