INTRODUCTION

This chapter explores how place-specific forms of life have become a key site for economic value generation in today's techno-monopoly capitalism. It does so by investigating Naples’ pathway to becoming a mass-tourism city and, more particularly, a laboratory for experiential tourism. We argue that the analysis of Naples effectively discloses some of the ways in which the so-called experience economy is constituted as a crucial component of the urban field and its economic value extraction processes in the age of techno-monopoly capitalism. In this particular instance, the urban field brings together technology monopoly capital through the operations of digital platforms, the corporatized state, social polarization and the commodification and monetization of urban symbols and forms of life.

The conceptualization of the experience economy originated with management theorists who were the first to explore in the late 1990s the marketization of human living and local forms of life in post-Fordist economies (Pine II & Gilmore 1998). The emergence of the experience economy, therefore, occurred well before the advent of corporate-owned digital platforms and online social networks, which have significantly contributed to the recent reconfiguring of the experience economy as a crucial component of the urban field in the age of techno-monopoly. Through the analysis of Naples, the chapter makes visible the recent economization of human living and place-specific forms of urban life, as well as the negative outcomes that this economization and the related urban regeneration brings about: a new housing shortage, displacement of longtime urban dwellers and the exploitation of living labour, to mention but a few. In doing so, we continue to examine the dynamics and contradictions of the urban field in the age of techno-monopoly and the role played by the contemporary corporatized state in the orchestration of urban economies that are designed to extract value from place-specific urban forms of life.

The previous three chapters in particular have looked at the way in which the urban field has become a key site for observing the transformations of startup entrepreneurship, labour and the invention as well as utilization of human capital and the related mechanisms of economic value creation and extraction in contemporary techno-monopoly capitalism.