ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapter I attempted to show that the ‘securitisation’ of South Bank, and even the still relatively unusual (in London) deployment of private security patrols, does not necessarily make for the immaculate production of ‘singleminded space’. Rather, as Neil Leach puts it (drawing on Michel Foucault’s 1982 ‘Space, Power and Knowledge interview with Paul Rabinow’), ‘[i]t is not the form of the panopticon which controls behaviour, but the power differential between warden and inmates’ (Leach [ed.] 1997: 349). I have argued that at South Bank the exercise of power, and so this ‘power differential’ between guard and user, is not invariable, but rather subject to a number of mediating processes that I have theorised as instances of a spatial politics of discretion.
