Creative tourism: Buenos Aires and the authenticity production of tango dance tourists

„Tango is the soy of Buenos Aires“, affirmed the current mayor of Buenos Aires Mauricio Macri. Just as the export of soy benefits Argentina’s overall economy, the local government sees the worldwide ‘export’ of Tango as benefiting the city’s urban economy. Indeed, the revalorization of the formerly neglected Tango culture reveals a profound shift in the urban development, which transformed Buenos Aires since the 1990ies into the most important tourist city in South America. The Tango culture, in turn, was intimately embedded in these urban tourist transformation processes.
In this context, the social phenomenon of tango dance tourism emerged as a specific form of “creative tourism”. As it will be argued in the presentation, this tourism requires a different approach to the conceptualization of the social production process of tourist ‘authenticity’ and its socio-normative implications. While the critical ‘postmodern’ turn in the urban studies of the 1990ies focus mainly on the symbolic or iconic production of authenticity, emphasizing commonly a type of collective ‘tourist gaze’, the specific case of tango dance tourism illustrates the more active and individualized involvement of tourists in the city. Thereby, urban theories on tourist authenticity, so the argument, needs to transcends their iconic presuppositions and widen their conceptual scope.