Chapter 2 Capital/Rebel City: London 2012 and the Struggle for Hegemony – Reflections on the Spatiality of Power
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This essay focuses on the subject of the spatiality of power by analysing contemporary London as a significant object and site in the struggle for and against neoliberal hegemony. The paper consists of two main parts: firstly, a semiotic analysis of the skyscraper called the Shard, completed in 2012, which is read as a spatial equivalent of the reassertion of the powers of capital after the financial crisis of 2007–08; and secondly, a discussion of two sets of ‘spatial practices,’ conceived as interventions in a more general struggle over the ‘common sense’ of the masses: the celebrations on the occasion of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee on the one hand and Occupy London on the other.