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In this article we examine elite formation in relation to money power within the city of London. Our primary aim is to consider the impact of the massive concentration of such power upon the city's political life, municipal and shared resources and social equity. We argue that objectives of city success have come to be identified and aligned with the presence of wealth elites while wider goals, of access to essential resources for citizens, have withered. A diverse national and global wealth-elite is drawn to a city with an almost unique cultural infrastructure, fiscal regime and ushering butler class of politicians. We consider how London is being made for money and the monied -in physical, political and cultural terms. We conclude that the conceptualization of elites as wealth and social power formations operating within urban spatial arenas is important for capturing the nature of new social divisions and changes.

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Critical urban theory and critical urban studies form the subject of two recent edited collections on approaches to the analysis and transformation of the contemporary capitalist city. In an exchange of commentaries by the respective editors and contributors, the introduction explains the genesis of each book and previews some of the key observations. Peter Marcuse then offers his assessment of Critical Urban Studies:New Directions, which is reciprocated by a commentary on Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City

In this paper, therefore, we examine one particular type of code: geodemographic classifications. These are an interesting form of code because they are an example of how code is itself instantiated, materialised, and constructed through what Dodge and Kitchin (2004; call`code/space' and`coded spaces'. According to Dodge and Kitchin (2008), code/spaces are``spaces dependent on software to function; that is the relationship is dyadic ... [w]ithout software enabled technologies the space would not be produced as intended'' (page 11). Coded space, on the other hand, is thought of as``a spatial transduction that is mediated by coded processes, but whose relationship is not dyadic'' (page 11). Our concern in this paper is with an example of the second of these: coded space. We take as our example geodemographic classifications, and examine how they are constructed in order to consider different levels at which space and code come together to produce coded space.In a sense, we deconstruct and decode geodemographic classifications as a way of uncovering the quite specific potentialities that this form of technological agency (Dodge and Kitchin, 2005) involves. We are engaged, therefore, in understanding the productive power of technology to make things happen via reiterative, transformative, or recursive practices. This is what Lash ( 2007) calls``[p]ower through the algorithm ... a society in which power is increasingly in the algorithm'' (page 71). This is manifest in situations where``codes offer modes of address öboth locating and hailing people