10. Flipping the Neighborhood: Biopolitical Marketing as Value Creation for Condos and Lofts

This study of contemporary condo and loft marketing practices and discourses illustrate two key valorization strategies of contemporary condominium and loft marketing: lifestyle community and enterprising consumption. These marketing discourses are situated within a larger theoretical discussion of the transformation of contemporary marketing from a discipline of panoptic control to the government of consumer productivity, what Hardt and Negri call “biopolitical production.” The final analysis argues that by enlisting buyers as participants in the ongoing process of production (via community, lifestyle, creative consumption, emotion, and affect), biopolitical marketing fosters and channels the emotional and creative energies of condo and loft dwellers through the logic of economic production, thus allowing the value of the real estate to emerge from the anticipated value of the immaterial labor of the inhabitants rather than from the object itself. As such, it argues that biopolitical marketing strategies become one of the central forces in transforming neighborhoods in the neoliberal cities.