Hyperreal Paradise Lost and Rebuilt

Abstract This article examines the luxury real estate market of Sint Maarten/Saint Martin. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of marketing materials and real estate data, the study shows how luxury narratives and hurricane cycles operate as a single system of value production. Luxury real estate marketers have turned the cycles of destruction by hurricanes, in conjunction with a weak regulatory framework, into an asset. Drawing upon Baudrillard, hyperreality here operationalizes fragility: vulnerability becomes the very mechanism of accumulation. In St Maarten, paradise is not represented but produced; models of marketing, finance, and “resilience” precede and organize reconstruction. The result is a simulacrum of paradise that sustains desirability through repetition of loss and renewal while displacing ecological and infrastructural risk into the code of investment. Our findings raise questions about sustainability and transparency in a luxury real estate market operating in a historically unequal and environmentally vulnerable context.