Counterculture as a Financial Asset: The Commodification of LX Factory in Lisbon

In recent decades, European cultural policies have become inseparable from urban policies, with culture becoming both the new promotional tool for cities aiming to be ‘creative’ (Vanolo, 2008; Vivant, 2009) and the source of unprecedented real estate profits (Zukin, 1982; Piraud, 2017a). This new alliance is underpinned more fundamentally by the emergence of capitalism that is both urbanized (Harvey, 1985) and cultural (Scott, 2014), born, among other things, from the absorption of the critical movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Boltanski&Chiapello, 1999). Con-temporary cultural and urban policies appear hence-forth to be profoundly shaped by the recognition and institutionalization of counter-cultural critiques and practices. In addition to the emergence of a “new spirit of capitalism”, this cultural metamorphosis of capitalism is very concretely manifested in the evolu-tion of forms of urban production, both in such pro-cesses as gentrification (Lees, Slater, Wyly, 2013) but also, as we will argue, in the evolution of urban aes-thetics and, more broadly, new forms of economic valuation (Boltanski&Esquerre, 2017; 2020).