Buenos Aires,capital of tango: tourism,redevelopment and the cultural politics of neoliberal urbanism

In this paper, I problematize the connections between global tourism, urban redevelopment and cultural policy in Buenos Aires. Market-oriented approaches to urban growth have continued after Argentina’s economic collapse of 2001–2002. Devaluation produced unprecedented international affordability, which triggered a tourism boom. City government capitalized on this through cultural initiatives. Yet tourist-oriented cultural entrepreneurialism promoted forms of disjointed redevelopment that exacerbate socio-spatial inequality and fragmentation. Moreover, Mayor Macri has been advancing a cultural politics of scale that recasts Buenos Aires as a world-class city, while mobilizing localist identities to oppose national efforts towards income redistribution and intercultural recognition. Particularly important have been the recent appropriations of tango as a cultural commodity. Deployed for city marketing and selective reinvestment, tango also emboldens Eurocentric narratives of cosmopolitan urbanity that legitimize racialized exclusion and geographical elitism. Concluding remarks suggest that socio-political uses of tango are not the exclusive domain of neoliberal urbanism, and research implications are discussed beyond Buenos Aires.