Slum tourism
case you need to use/Burgold and Rolfes 2012 Slum Tourism.pdf
161DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
Zusammenfassung Geführte touristische Touren in die städtischen Armutsviertel lassen sich in vielen Metropolen des Globalen Südens beobachten, z. B. in Kapstadt, Rio de Janeiro oder Mumbai. Das wachsende globale Interesse am Slum- tourismus wird von einer Debatte begleitet, in der oft mit moralischen Kategorien argumentiert wird und die bisher noch nicht wissenschaftlich untersucht worden ist. In diesem Beitrag soll nicht danach gefragt werden, ob Slumtourismus moralisch vertretbar ist oder nicht. Allerdings soll auf der Metaebene diskutiert werden, wie im Slumtourismus als eine soziale Praxis moralische Kategorien mitgeführt werden. Dazu sol- len Aussagen von Touristen und Touranbietern über die moralische Vertretbarkeit der Touren ausgewertet werden. Ein besonderes Augenmerk soll zudem auf das Verhältnis von Moral und Raum gelegt werden. Die Grundthese des Beitrags lautet, dass die moralische Bewertung des Slumtourismus mit spezifischen Per spektiven auf Slums und Armut zusammenhängt. Dies soll anhand von zwei Fallstudien dargestellt werden, die (1) in Kapstadt (2007 und 2008) sowie (2) in Mumbai (2009) durchgeführt wurden.
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai Julia Burgold1 and Manfred Rolfes1
1 Universität Potsdam, Institut für Geographie, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24-25, 14476 Potsdam, Germany, [email protected], [email protected]
Manuscript submitted: 29 May 2012 / Accepted for publication: 08 July 2013 / Published online: 19 November 2013
Abstract Sightseeing in the poorest quarters of southern hemisphere cities has been observed occurring in Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai and many other cities. The increasing global interest in touring poor urban environments is accom- panied by a strong morally charged debate; so far, this debate has not been critically addressed. This article avoids asking if slum tourism is good or bad, but instead seeks a second-order observation, i.e. to investigate under what conditions the social praxis of slum tourism is considered as good or bad, by processing information on esteem or dis- esteem among tourists and tour providers. Special attention is given to any relation between morality and place, and the thesis posited is that the moral charging of slum tourism is dependent on the presence of specific preconceived notions of slums and poverty. This shall be clarified by means of references to two empirical case studies carried out in (1) Cape Town in 2007 and 2008 and (2) Mumbai in 2009.
Burgold, Julia and Manfred Rolfes: Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai. – DIE ERDE 144 (2): 161-174
DOI: 10.12854/erde-144-12
Vol. 144, No. 2 · Research article
D I E E R D E Journal of the
Geographical Society of Berlin
Keywords Slum tourism, township tourism, morality, place
162 DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
1. Introducing considerations regarding slum tourism and its morality
Slum tourism has emerged and become successfully established in many cities the world over. The phenom- enon has historical forerunners in the Global North (Steinbrink and Pott 2010); however, in the Global South1 it is only since the 1990s that slum tourism has been run professionally in cities such as Cape Town, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai. Apart from these prominent examples, slum tourism also occurs in Mexico City (Dürr 2012; Dürr and Jaffe 2012), Del- hi, Nairobi, Windhoek and Manila. Slum tours have become highly organised and attract people in their thousands. In 2006, in Cape Town alone, township tours were attended by approximately 300,000 people (AP 2007). Here, more than 40 township tour provid- ers have established themselves in a growing market, and tours run to almost all of the townships. In Rio de Janeiro, professionally conducted favela tourism is also a growing market, albeit less significantly in terms of visitor numbers than in Cape Town. In 2009, the most frequently visited favela in Rio, Rocinha, had approximately 40,000 visitors (Freire-Medeiros 2009: 580). The number of tourists visiting Rio’s favelas is expected to increase as the Brazilian police attempts to clear out favela drug gangs ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. In contrast, slum tourism in Mumbai is a relatively recent phenomenon. Slum tour- ism in Mumbai only started in 2006, and at the time of the empirical research conducted in 2009, Reality Tours and Travel was the only provider running pro- fessional and regular tours. The agency was founded by Chris Way (UK) and Krishna Poojary (India), and brought about 7,000 tourists to the well-known inner- city slum of Dharavi in 2010 (Meschkank 2012: 145).
Describing this tourism phenomenon has to date been undertaken using very disparate terms. In recent academic publications, the phrases ‘slum tourism’ or ‘slumming’ have frequently been used (see articles in Frenzel et al. 2012). Some authors and tour opera- tors use terms such as ‘social tours’ or ‘reality tours’, partly because they consider that the tours contain strong interactive features, but also – seemingly – be- cause they wish to present or advertise tours as being authentic or realistic. Other authors, placing cultural and ethnic authenticity at the centre of the discussion, argue for an emphasis on the educational aspects of the tours, and refer to them as a form of cultural or ethnic tourism (Ramchander 2004; Jaguaribe and Hetherington 2004). Some authors consider the tours
to contain morally dubious socio-voyeuristic aspects, and so employ terms like poverty tourism and poor- ism. In view of recent scientific discussions, our choice is to use the most neutral term, slum tourism.
The increasing global interest in touring poor ur- ban environments is accompanied by vivid morally charged discussions. The negative view is that sight- seeing in a city’s poorest neighbourhoods is consid- ered to be an example of voyeurism and exploitation for commercial ends. Based on an assumed markedly asymmetrical relationship between those who are thought of as the tourist attraction and those who are the tourists, critics of slum tourism often argue that the dignity of slum dwellers is violated by the tourist gaze. Such critics have equated slum tours with tours of zoos and safaris. The positive view holds that slum tourism is considered to be philanthropic and educa- tional. Proponents of slum tourism argue that seeing how people live in slums raises social awareness of poverty and is, as such, a precondition for change.
Against this background this paper aims to answer the questions:
(1) How do slums become valued as tourist destina- tions, or how are slums touristically (re-)inter- preted?
(2) To what extent is a morally charged perspective of slum tourism influenced by specific precon- ceptions of slums and poverty?
In this contribution, the terms ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ are used with reference to Luhmann (1991, 2008). From his epistemological view, ‘morality’ “is a special form of communication which carries with it indica- tions of approval or disapproval” (Luhmann 1991: 84). According to Luhmann, “it is not a question of good or bad achievements in specific respects, e.g. as an as- tronaut, musician, researcher or football player, but of the whole person insofar as he/she is esteemed as a participant in communication” (Luhmann 1991: 84). Defining morality as “the conditions of the market of approval” (Luhmann 1991: 84), the term ‘ethics’ or ‘ethical’ can be differentiated terminologically. Luh- mann considers ‘ethics’ “to be a theoretical reflection of morality” (Luhmann 1991: 85) that emerged when morality lost its social and religious ‘anchorage’. Luh- mann says that with Kant and Bentham ethics was established as a philosophical discipline tasked with the rational grounding of moral judgements (Luhmann
163DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
1991: 85). Although praising the achievements of both philosophers, however, Luhmann points out that aca- demic ethics have failed because they have not been able to provide generally accepted ‘reasons’ for mo- rality. Based on systems theory and its constructivist epistemology, Luhmann states that “every grounding of statements on ethics and morality must take a self- referential form” (Luhmann 1991: 88), and concludes that contemporary ethics has to give up trying to provide definitive reasons for morality. Instead, if the assumption is correct that “modern society can no longer be integrated by means of morality” (Luhmann 1991: 90), then ethics should be “in the position to limit the sphere of application of morality” (Luhmann 1991: 90), and – considering the close relationship between morality, conflict and force – even to “warn against morality” (Luhmann 1991: 90).
Morality and place2 are closely linked. Ermann and Redepenning (2010: 6) argue that spatial units and spatial distances are evaluated and closely linked to moral judgements on various scales and at vari- ous levels, from climate sinners and terror states to troubled neighbourhoods. They further point out that such a localisation of moral communication “is a con- ventional tool used for bringing order into the world and to make relevant moralities and amoralities ad- dressable” (Ermann and Redepenning 2010: 6; trans- lation JB, MR). Research in the field of geography has been interested in the interface between morality and place for some time. In the English-speaking world, moral geography has even established itself as a dis- tinct strain of geographical research. Nonetheless, geographical works regarding morality and place are anything but uniform. As Ermann and Redepenning (2010) note, there are various approaches, with a range of emphases: from those aiming to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ places (Sack 1999), to those promot- ing an ethically informed geography that should help in the creation of a better world (Smith 2000), to those analysing how social groups and individuals use dis- tinctions such as good and bad, and project them onto distinct places (Lippuner and Lossau 2004).
In this article we avoid a normative perspective, and instead seek a second-order observation; in other words, to observe how other observers observe the social praxis of slum tourism. Without asking if slum tourism is good or bad, we consider morality as a set of distinctions and seek to observe how these distinc- tions are drawn. We propose to find out under what conditions the social praxis of slum tourism is consid-
ered as good or bad and thereby processing esteem or disesteem among tourists and tour providers. Special attention is therefore given to any relation between morality and place. This shall be clarified by means of references to two empirical case stud- ies: (1) Cape Town, carried out in 2007 and 2008, and (2) Mumbai, carried out in 2009. The empirical research undertaken in both case studies engaged a qualitative and multi-perspective design to address the perspectives of tour-participating tourists as well as those of the relevant tour operators.
In Cape Town, the survey of township tourism comprised a combination of qualitative and quan- titative methods. 20 different township tours, of- fered by 12 different companies, were analysed in respect to their routes, destinations and choice of different stops. Qualitative interviews were under- taken with nine tour operators. We conducted ex- pert interviews with the representatives of small, middle-sized and large companies (a classification based on the number of employees, the approxi- mate tour capacit y and the number of buses). This means that there was a range: from rather informal one-person companies to highly professionalised tourism enterprises. Furthermore, 179 randomly selected tourists were interviewed through the use of a standardised questionnaire just before they en- tered the township (80 % of the respondents were Europeans, 17 % from the U.S.A.), and 100 of them were also asked to fill out a standardised question- naire af ter the tour (see Rolfes et al. 2009).
In Mumbai, the empirical research focused on Reality Tours and Travel and their Dharavi Slum Tours. There- fore we participated in a Dharavi tour several times. The choice of tour stops and the stories relating to these locations, as well as the interaction between slum dwellers and tourists, were protocolled. Addi- tionally, qualitative interviews with 19, also random- ly selected, tour participants of all ages, mainly from Europe but also from the United States and Australia, were conducted before and after the tours. Questions raised before the tours focused on particular subjects, such as sources of information, motivation for taking part in the tour and pre-tour expectations and im- ages. After the tours, questions were posed relating to the participants’ overriding impressions, surprises and disappointments, and more generally about their views regarding the positive and negative aspects of slum life. Furthermore, interviews with the tour com- pany’s owners, Chris Way and Krishna Poojary, and
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
164 DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
one tour guide were conducted. In both case studies, the interviews were transcribed. Using the meth- ods of qualitative content analysis, we constructed systematising codes and categories by reducing and abstracting from the original interview texts. The full extent of the outcomes of these case studies is not presented here in detail (Meschkank 2011, 2013; Rolfes 2010). The results included here are only those which pertain to illustrating that slum tourism is a highly moralised form of social acting. Some signifi- cant and meaningful passages are quoted to under- line our arguments and conclusions.
The focused results of our empirical research in Mum- bai and Cape Town are presented in Sections 2 and 3. Section 2 presents the motivations of both tour pro- viders and tourists and argues that the main interest for both groups is not the presentation and consump- tion of squalor and misery, but rather the provision of a greater understanding of urban poverty. Sec- tion 3 focuses on descriptions of the main perceptual schemes present before, during and after the tours, during which slums in Mumbai and townships in Cape Town are observed. Section 4 contains an analysis of how the phenomenon of touring poorer city quarters is itself observed. Special attention is given to any re- lation between morality and place. Finally, the conclu- sion (Section 5) addresses the questions raised above, and (1) clarifies how slums are touristically (re)inter- preted and (2) identifies the relationship between the moral charging of slum tourism and specific precon- ceived notions of slums and poverty.
2. Slum tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai: Motivations of tour providers and tourists
In light of the belief that slum tours contain morally dubious socio-voyeuristic aspects, an analysis of tour providers’ and participating tourists’ statements re- garding their motivations for presenting or consum- ing slums, respectively, as a touristic commodity is the logical first step. Understanding tourism as a con- text of communication, where supply and demand are related to each other, we argue that providers of slum tours respond to a specific demand and, at the same time, define, stabilise and stimulate this demand (Pott 2007: 75). For this reason, the views of tourists and tour providers show certain parallels. Indeed, the em- pirical results from both case studies indicate that tour providers as well as tourists conceive the slum tour as a reality tour. Providers of slum and township
tours market them as reality tours, inviting tourists to see the ‘real India’, the ‘real Africa’, or slum life ‘as it really is’. Not surprisingly, analyses of the interviews with tourists made it clear that among this group the central motivation for visiting a slum or a township was the quest for real and authentic experiences. The results of both case studies further indicate that dif- ferent meanings are attributed to the notion of reality. In the context of slum tourism, reality tourism means (1) to show and see the real slum, and (2) to show and see the real side of the visited city or country.
2.1 Seeing and experiencing ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ slum life
All interviewed providers of slum and township tours – regardless of the size and professionalism of the compa- nies – advertise their tours with promises that insights will be gained into ‘real’ slum life. Recent and previous empirical studies3 have revealed how tour companies seek to show the ‘real’ slum by transforming the nega- tive semantic field that surrounds touristic notions of slums and poverty, which tour companies believe is caused by national and international media. Krishna Poojary, for example, argues that people normally have the image that slums are dangerous, and that people are sitting around and doing nothing. Defining this nega- tive image as unreal, Poojary and his company want to show ‘a different side, a real side of the slum’. As such, they market their Dharavi tour by describing the slum to be visited as ‘a place of poverty and hardship but also a place of enterprise, humour and non-stop activity’. South African tour providers, when justifying their se- lection of sights to be shown to tourists, argue similarly, as illustrated by this quote: “They [the tourists] are not interested in negative things like poverty, politics. But they just want to see how [South Africa] has changed, projected. (…) Positive life, positive story, to tell when they go back home” (tour provider, Cape Town). Slum and township tours do not generally seek to emphasise depictions of pain, suffering and hardship, but rather they seek to present slums positively, by focusing on as- pects such as the spirit and culture of the local commu- nity, the changing and upgrading of living conditions, the multifarious and often informal economic activities of residents, the commercial and technical infrastruc- ture of the slums and townships, the development initi- atives, and the social and charitable projects that occur within the visited environments.
When tourists were asked about their motivations for taking a tour, nearly all replied that they had an in-
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
165DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
terest in the daily life of, and living conditions experi- enced by, slum residents. Nearly half of the respond- ents also expressed a wish to experience personally the globally circulated and mediated images of slums and townships. “Yes, that you have other impressions than on the TV. That you are close to the source of action and that you can run around among all these people having a look at the right and at the left and let all this affect your senses” (tourist, Mumbai). Or: “After the visit we can decide, what’s told to us by the media about the townships whether it’s true or not” (tourist, Cape Town). From the interviews, it became clear that behind this interest in personal experience lay a critical attitude towards the images produced by the mass media, especially those regarding nega- tive portrayals of poverty. In relation to this, tourists identified the educational benefits of a slum tour, and they assumed that the insights they gained into this other way of life would “broaden their horizon”. The quest for unmediated, real experiences is described elsewhere as the quest for experiential knowledge (Matthews 2008: 106) and hands-on-experiences (Freire-Medeiros 2007: 62). Following Baumann’s (2000) observation that societies are becoming in- creasingly fragmented, disembedded and globalised, and that identity and other social factors are becom- ing more and more contingent or ambivalent, Wang (2000) argues that experiential knowledge provid- ed by travel becomes an even more important and sought-after commodity (Matthews 2008: 106).
2.2 Experiencing the ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ Mumbai and Cape Town
Another strategy that a vast majority of the tour pro- viders use in their advertising is to praise slum tours by describing them as journeys to the other, ‘real’ side of the city or country being visited: “Many tour- ists come to Mumbai, the commercial capital of India, roam sitting in the back of the limousine, avail the luxuries of five star hotels, make big business deals and leave the city with a smile on their face appreci- ating the luxuries and comforts they have been pro- vided with in India. But do they really see the Real India? Do they really appreciate the Real India? To find an answer to these questions, dear friends, you need to get down from your luxury cars at a place where Real India exists. On our slum tour in Mumbai, we take you to the Dharavi Slum which shows the other side of the glamorous city of Mumbai” (Tour Provider Go Heritage India Journeys).
An integral part of the marketing strategies of slum tour providers, as illustrated by this quote, is the di- vision of the city into modern business districts and poorer urban quarters, which respectively represent both the city’s unreal and real sides. As a result of our interviews with tour operators in Cape Town in 2007- 08 and our studies of the operators’ advertising bro- chures and homepages, it became obvious that, as in Mumbai, the tour operators assume that most town- ship tourists want to see ‘the far side’ of Cape Town and search for a ‘complete’ or ‘real’ picture of the city – or of South Africa in general (Rolfes et al. 2009: 29). Similarly, one third of the tourists interviewed in Mumbai justified their decision to participate in a tour by identifying their wish to experience the real life of the cities they visit: “It is the wish to see reality. I want to see how real people live in a city. The knowl- edge that there is a lot of poverty in India and the feel- ing that you have to see this poverty, that I always feel stupid not to see it, to see only the palaces and the mu- seums” (tourist, Mumbai). The 179 township tourists interviewed in Cape Town answered similarly: 65 to 80 % of them wanted to see the living conditions in the townships and ‘real Africa’ (Rolfes et al. 2009: 38).
The question arises: Why do the poorest districts re- present ‘real’ and authentic African and Indian life? MacCannell (1976: 93) argues that the tourist’s quest for authenticity comes as a result of society’s differen- tiation between front and back regions and, as mod- ern life lacks real and true experiences, tourists are led to seek for them in pre-modern societies. Given this context, one can argue that tourists attribute authenticity to pre-modern societies, traces of which cannot be found in modern, metropolitan, globalised city centres, but rather in settlements conceived of as pre-modern, such as slums4. Indeed, the distinction between modern guest society and pre-modern host society could be found in some of the tourists’ state- ments, and often came with an idealisation and ro- manticising of the latter. To illustrate, one interview- ee judged an impending redevelopment project in Dharavi as follows: “Because going back to this thing about rehousing people in high-rise blocks, which is the easy way out, I don’t think it is the answer. They lose their communities, they lose their trades, and they lose their history. You know, in Western Europe we have done it and it has been a disaster” (tourist, Mumbai). The poverty and pre-modernity of South African townships are seen to have a close relation with ethnic categories. As a result of the ethnically segregated development of South Africa’s cities under
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
166 DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
Apartheid, townships especially are seen to represent ‘real’ Black Africa. As such, the trademarks of town- ship tours are the historical development of the town- ships and the political struggle against Apartheid, as well as Black African culture in general.
These selected findings and reflections show that tour providers and tourists both seek to present or consume real and authentic experiences. All providers claim to show, and tourists report, seeing slum life ‘how it re- ally is’. Simultaneously, these places are thought to re- present the city’s or country’s real and authentic side. The following section addresses the question how real or true slum and township life, and real or true Indian and African life, are presented by slum tour companies and perceived by visiting tourists.
3. Transforming notions of slums and townships: Making slum tours morally acceptable
Findings from our empirical studies show that – in addition to their commercial and economic motives – all slum tour companies aim to correct the tourist public’s perceptions of slums and townships by or- ganising tours that run through them. Indeed, one of the tour companies stated that its central objective was to achieve a transformation and improvement of the negative reputation of the visited settlements. This position was also presented personally by tour company owners, tour company employees and tour guides during discussions undertaken for the pur- poses of our research: “We show you the poor, but the positives of the poor and the developments ... that’s our business strategy” (tour provider, Cape Town). “The tourists want to have a brainstorm” (tour guide, Cape Town). Thus, it can be concluded that the opera- tors are working on changing the slum or township images held by tourists, and that the tours contribute to improving the image of slums and townships.
In Mumbai as well as in Cape Town, tour providers at- tempt to achieve their aim of transforming the tour- ists’ negative imagery by designing tours that will be considered as authentic and as realistic as possible. The authenticity is to be obtained by using locals as tour guides, by providing opportunities for conver- sational contact with the slum and township inhab- itants, and by offering insights into private and eco- nomic everyday situations. The tours usually take place within the scope of a walking tour in small and inconspicuous groups. Tourists in these groups are
advised to practice appropriate restraint (e.g. not to take photographs). In order to achieve an image trans- formation, however, it is also important that tours are conceived in a way that responds to the common no- tions and expectations that tourists have of slums and townships. The arbitrariness of how to interpret and represent a destination is limited, because the mean- ings ascribed to a destination by tourists are usually relatively resistant to change (Pott 2007: 188). Due to this, if they are to change a destination’s image, providers of slum or township tours must first make reference to the imagery predominant in the minds of tourists, and then consciously distance themselves from it by establishing alternative programmes of imagery. Therefore, this section addresses the fol- lowing questions: What assumptions do tour organis- ers make regarding the associations tourists have in relation to slums? Furthermore, how do they use the prevailing imagery held by tourists to form points of reference? Which sights and scenes do they exploit in order to structure tourists’ perceptions differently? And in view of this, how do tourists perceive a slum/ township after taking a tour?
3.1 How is the image of a slum or a township changed?
The interviews with tour company owners and guides showed that slum-tour organisers assumed that tour- ists primarily perceived these settlements as places of poverty. Furthermore, tour company owners stated that they believed tourists had a mental picture of pov- erty, connected with various negative attributes. These negative attributes can be generalised and placed under three main categories: exclusion, insecurity and stag- nation. In connection with these negative attributes, for nearly all tourists slums and townships emotionally symbolise squalor, hardship and despair. In Mumbai, for example, Krishna Poojary, owner of Reality Tours and Travel, assumes that tourists believe Dharavi’s residents to be lazy, inert people incapable of changing their situation. “Basically, what happens when you say the word ‘slum’? That name gives all the negative im- ages: that people are just poor or doing nothing; that they are sitting around; that there is a high crime rate that children don’t go to school, and this kind of stuff”. Our interviews in Cape Town showed similar results: A significant number of the interviewees assumed that tourists are curious about poverty and developmental processes. Slum and township tours are therefore or- ganised in relation to the beliefs that the target group are assumed to have. All tour companies aim to correct
167DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
these (assumed) negative associations by presenting particular sights and scenes capable of responding to the preconceived expectations, but simultaneously contrasting them and changing them.
Most of the locations visited by tours are chosen be- cause they counteract notions of exclusion, insecurity and stagnation by symbolising and embodying oppo- sitional stances such as creativity, culture, community and development. In order to remove or confront the idea that slum residents are economically excluded – ‘sitting around doing nothing’ – tours focus on show- ing the economic creativity and activity of slum dwell- ers. For example, Reality Tours and Travel presents Dharavi as a place of high economic productivity, containing more than 10,000 small-scale industries and generating an annual turnover of US$ 665 million. Visits to these small-scale industries, where produc- tion processes can be seen in action, form the heart of the slum tour. Tourists report experiencing Dharavi’s residents as honest, hardworking people with jobs, hoping to cover their living costs despite poor working and living conditions. The overriding impression given to tourists is that slum people have found incredibly creative and innovative ways for coping with life.
In Cape Town, on most township tours the culture of slum dwellers and their role in the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa are foregrounded and praised. From surveys of tour advertising (e.g. home- pages and brochures) with respect to the sights pre- sented during tours, and concerning the motives of the tour operators, it became obvious that nearly all tours are focused on the culture of the townships and on Black South African history. One reads and hears about a proud people who succeeded in its struggles against Apartheid; a people who kept its traditions, who danc- es and lives its life to the rhythm of music (Rolfes et al. 2009: 29). Addressing these cultural, ethnic and his- torical features, the tours make it manifest that the township residents are not excluded; rather, they are the heart of (the new) South African society.
Another image, which approximately two thirds of the tours refer to, is that of slums as places of insecu- rity, in particular in reference to crime. Some South African travel guides even contain explicit warnings about criminality in townships (Steinbrink and Frehe 2008: 38). Tour guides refer to criminal incidents only occasionally; a higher priority of the tours is the con- veying of the sense of community as it exists among the slum or township residents. Tour guides in Dhar-
avi, for example, mention that the slum was once con- trolled by the mafia, and experienced violent rioting as Hindus fought Muslims, but they emphasise that to- day, government involvement has been strengthened and mafia influence reduced, and that members of the different religious groups live together harmoniously. Almost all tour providers and guides interviewed in Cape Town ascertained that presenting social cohe- sion was a crucial part of their tours and a strategy for ensuring that crime and insecurity should cease to be considered an issue. “Yeah, it’s [my township tour]… very, very safe. Because I think most of the people know me. They know my house, they know where I am working because like each and everyone comes here and even in that area I used to be one of the com- munity members” (tour provider, Cape Town). In both case studies, slum tours stress the sense of commu- nity that exists among the poor. In contrast to the idea of poor people being aggressive, violent or even crimi- nal, they show people who are peaceful, friendly and helpful, even though, or even because, they are poor.
Stressing the creativity, activity and community of slum residents contradicts the notions that slums are places of stagnation and despair. Generally speaking, the tours leave tourists with an impression of devel- opment and hope. This is reinforced by visiting pre- schools and schools. Tour guides in Dharavi, for exam- ple, never seem to tire of stressing the fact that 85 % of Dharavi’s children go to school, and of this number 15 % go on to gain higher qualifications and employ- ment as skilled workers for banks or large multina- tional companies. In addition, tourists have their at- tention directed towards government and private redevelopment efforts, particularly those involved in the provision of basic structures for bringing running water and electricity into the slum. A vast majority of slum and township tours also focusus on the hetero- geneity of the settlements, showing various residen- tial areas which contain different types of housing – from provisionally built huts to more or less recently built single family homes and apartment buildings. In Cape Town, tour guides often state (and show through selected sights) that the townships are precisely the nucleus of the development of a new South Africa.
3.2 How do tourists perceive these image transformations?
An examination of tourists’ perceptions of slums and townships after participating in tours determines whether their preconceived images of the slums/town-
168 DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
ships have been broadened, modified or confirmed by the tours. For this reason, tourists in Mumbai (via in- terviews) and those in Cape Town (via questionnaires) were asked what observations they had throughout the course of the tour, and what impressed or sur- prised them most. The analysis of any unexpected re- sults of the surveys also aimed to find out what mental pictures and ideas of the slums and townships tourists had had before they embarked on a tour.
Although one fifth of the tourists noted with surprise the comparatively high standard of public and commer- cial infrastructure, the majority remained dismayed at the poor living and working conditions they observed during the tours. In particular, they were disturbed by the high population density, the poor housing situ- ation, the dangerously poor sanitation and the general lack of hygiene. For many tourists, these were sufficient reasons for continuing to consider the visited slum or township as a place of poverty. However, the analysis of the interviews and questionnaires revealed that the perceptions and evaluations of poverty had changed.
All interviewees in Mumbai were impressed by what they saw as an entrepreneurial spirit among slum res- idents. “What surprised me is the bustle of the slum. The bustle in terms of that there is trade, that there are markets and that there is a proper life. It is not like as it is often imagined that people are lying around in the dirt, vegetating and go begging. It is an area, slum – I don’t want to use that word. It is a less developed area, in which just the same intelligent, talented and highly creative people live” (tourist after a Dharavi tour). This tourist became conscious of the expectations he im- plicitly carried regarding slums and poverty – passiv- ity, unemployment and begging – after observing that residents were hardworking and highly productive.
Tourists in Cape Town were also asked what observa- tions they had made during the tours, and what had impressed them most. Two fifths of the visitors were especially impressed by the friendliness of the resi- dents; one fifth mentioned that the comparatively high standard of public and commercial infrastructure was a surprising slum characteristic for them. That many tourists mentioned these points obviously reflected the fact that their expectations were overturned. Be- fore the beginning of the tour, two thirds of visitors had associated the township with ‘poverty’. Given the asso- ciations with such an expectation, it is no surprise that most tourists found the prevalence of happy people and a relatively developed infrastructure to be particularly
surprising. The semantic profile (Fig. 1) filled out be- fore and after the township tour indicates that people who took part in a tour were much more likely to as- sociate townships with happy and friendly inhabitants. The prevailing tendency switched from sad to happy. The same holds true for the notions ‘hopeful’ and ‘peaceful’. Here, the expectations of a high number of respondents were more negative before the tour. In ad- dition to this, the percentage of tourists who classified the townships as rather dangerous was significantly lower after the tour. In the case of this word pair, the evaluation inclined more towards ‘safe’. Similarly, after taking a Dharavi tour, about two thirds of the tourists expressed surprise at the harmonious community- style living they had seen. Seeing the slum residents giving one another mutual support and assistance con- founded their expectations that there would be a vis- ibly high incidence of anti-social behaviour and crime. Two thirds of all the interviewed tourists in Dharavi perceived the visited slum more in terms of develop- ment than stagnation after taking a tour. One Dharavi tourist stated after the tour: “I expected people to be more desperate, actually. And I expected more stagna- tion, so that people would be rather like: Ok, we are in a bad situation and unless the government is going to help us, it is not going to change. But it was complete- ly different. It was a really great community spirit in there. Everybody tried to improve and be as productive as possible”. This statement, besides being an observa- tion of entrepreneurial behaviour and peaceful com-
Fig. 1 Evaluation of specific aspects of a township before and after the tour. In order to test the significance of the differ- ences, the U test was applied (* = 5 % level, ** = 1 % level**)5.
169DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
munal co-habitation, may also be attributable to the tourist’s observation of educational institutions in the slum. One third of the Dharavi tourists referred specifi- cally to these and noted their observations of the slum residents’ desire for improvement and hope for a better future. However, one third of the interviewed Dharavi tourists could not see any development perspectives for the slum dwellers. The low quality of education and the feared relocating of the slum dwellers and their indus- tries as a result of the forthcoming redevelopment pro- ject were cited as the main reasons.
From the analysis it becomes apparent that the visits to slums and townships bring about significant chang- es in the perceptions held by the tourists. The choices made by tour operators and agents within visited set- tlements regarding what sights and scenes are pre- sented do apparently not miss the intended goal, which is to improve the slum/township’s image. An image of slums and townships predominantly characterised by dreariness and greyness becomes more variegated, and at times even veered towards bright and rosy, as exist- ing notions of exclusion, insecurity and stagnation are contrasted with experiences and images of creativity, culture, community and development. In the majority of cases, the tourists’ perceptions of slums and townships change, from seeing them as places of despair to places of hope: “I think the term slum has changed. (…) I have seen happy faces, friendly faces and satisfied faces and hope. What makes me happy. And not hate, crime, mis- ery and pain, what one can really feel”. A French tourist spoke about her experience in the Soweto Township: “I didn’t want to go there first because I don’t want to see them like I mean a safari, like a zoo (…) but after that I realised that they are proud of their history, proud of their township and they are very friendly”.
Some tourists experienced irritation from having their expectations contradicted by the tours and had somehow to come to grips with this irritation. Half of those interviewed in Mumbai resolved this by contest- ing Dharavi’s slum status, and by choosing to relocate ‘true’ poverty elsewhere. Poverty in the sense of exclu- sion, insecurity and stagnation was relocated to Africa, South America or India’s countryside. Only three of the 19 tourists interviewed in Dharavi criticised the pre- dominantly positive portrayal of a slum dweller’s life, and therefore contested the authenticity of the tour.
However, as we have seen, all the tour operators aim to transform a slum or a township’s image, as well as the image of the tours themselves. Therefore,
the expectations of tourists are addressed by tour companies by focusing tours on poverty and slum settlements. However, slum and township tours re- interpret and transform the features that they ad- dress. Instead of insecurity, exclusion and stagna- tion, notions of creativity, culture and development are established as central characteristic elements of slums. Our findings also show that reinterpretation and transformation of slums and townships are ac- cepted by the vast majority of the tourists. The tours are mostly perceived as authentic, as an opportunity for tourists to gain insights into the ‘true life’ of slum dwellers and residents of a visited country. Moral concerns in the minds of tourists evidently seem to be settled, and are not found to persist.
Due to the small number of cases drawn from tourists and tour operators it was not possible – and not even necessary – to create types or to strive for typifica- tion: Based on our research experiences, there were no reasons to think that the observed changes in at- titude or perception differed according to sex, age or origin of the tourists, or their duration of stay. Inde- pendent of the socio-economic or demographic status of the tourist groups we achieved very similar results.
4. The relation between slum tourism, morality and place
Moral communication regarding the touring of poorer urban quarters in the Global South is ambivalent. The social praxis of slum tourism is considered wrong and right, bad and good, forbidden and requested. The cen- tral issue, therefore, is what the conditions are for the processing of esteem or disesteem among slum tour providers and participating tourists. The following brief analysis of several newspaper and magazine arti- cles undertaken for the purposes of this article and an analysis of the tourists’ moral statements will clarify the relation between moral judgements on slum tours and their involved social agents, and particular no- tions held regarding slums or townships in general. Our findings show that arguments against this form of tourism are closely linked to specific negative no- tions of slums. Namely, slums are usually linked with misery, dirt, crime, violence, prostitution, desolation and desperation (Wertz 2009). Consequently, visiting tourists are described as “cheerful visitors in bright holiday T-shirts” (Gentleman 2006) who are “weary of civilisation” (Wertz 2009). Such tourists are con- trasted with the “emaciated slum residents facing a
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
170 DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
ruthlessly dark life” (Wertz 2009). From this perspec- tive, slum tours do indeed appear to be voyeuristic and exploitative, as argued by their opponents. Critics also consider slum tours to be an intrusion of the slum resi- dents’ privacy and dignity and, in effect, treat slum res- idents like animals in a zoo (Odede 2010). In contrast, arguments for slum tourism are seen to be linked with more positive notions of slums, such as creativity, in- novation, productivity, culture and hope (Weiner 2008; Rice 2009; Hansen 2009). Consequently, slum tourists, who are described as respectful and genuinely in- terested visitors (Richardson 2009), are warmly wel- comed by friendly and gracious slum residents (Weiner 2008). Advocates of slum tours consider them to be instances of philanthropic and responsible travel, not only promoting social awareness of poverty but also – via financial donations – having a real impact.
Similarly, perhaps, to the line of argument common- ly found in newspaper and magazine articles, half of the tourists interviewed before a Dharavi tour also expressed moral doubts and a sense of guilt, as they anticipated seeing poverty in the sense of misery: “On the same hand it is stupid, that I am much more in- terested in poverty than I am in richness. And I think Mumbai is a city which combines both. And still I am, and that’s the disaster tourism part of it, that I am more intrigued by the poverty” (slum tourist, Dhara- vi). Here, it is evident that a specific notion of poverty as a ‘disaster’ is what makes this tourist feel guilty. Similarly, in Cape Town a township tourist stated that “I actually didn’t want to make the Township Tour be- cause I thought it is a bit voyeuristic. And I can’t go there and take pictures of poor people and [I] might stare at them”. Our results indicate that the described semantic change of notions surrounding slums or townships, as described in Section 2.2, largely re- solves concerns tourists have about the morality of these tours; the criteria that are used to assign the values good/bad seem to change. The above-quoted Dharavi tourist stated after the tour: “I don’t think this is disaster tourism. I think disaster tourism is when one person has a major problem and people are watching it and it gives a positive feeling to the people, who are watching it. But when I was walking there, I didn’t really have the feeling that people were having a problem. I mean, according to my Western view, it is quite poor there, and I see that it is quite dirty and es- pecially it is quite unhealthy to be there in the smoke, to work in the plastic industries. But I have the feeling that the people who are living there are quite hopeful and are quite happy with their life”.
Three of the tourists interviewed after a Dharavi tour even considered it the duty of any serious traveller to look at the whole of a destination’s reality, even though this might involve looking at pain: “A lot of people that like to come to India like to buy their sou- venirs, like to go to Goa lying on the beach and they like to have food served to them in the restaurants. (…) But at the same time maybe most of the people don’t want to see, because it is quite upsetting to see, but it is there and it is also reality and maybe it is good to see that that’s how some people live. It is education to go and to see that, and also from a moral point of view I think you should go and see it, if you have an opportunity to do so safely”. Here, the conditions of distributing esteem or disesteem are reversed; the vice becomes a virtue. Slum tours are considered as right and requested, whereas the usual holiday on a beach is criticised. Slum tourism is constructed as a more desirable alternative to the usual programmes of mass tourism catering to so called “sun-sea-and- sex backpackers” (Elsrud 2001: 608). The emotion- ally challenging aspects of slum and township tours are used to draw an image of slum tourists as “serious and respectful observers, and even discoverers of the real world” (Urbain 1993, quoted in Farías 2008: 19). Thus, slum tourists are attributed having more moral integrity than their critics, and more than those who participate in touristic escapism.
The controversy surrounding slum tourism is just one example of the debate about the increasing moralisa- tion of tourism, as identified by Butcher (2003). He highlights that all alternative forms of tourism, such as ecotourism, community tourism or volunteer tourism, tend to have one thing in common: They understand themselves as the moral alternative to conventional mass tourism (Butcher 2003: 1). These New Moral Tourists form their identity by dissociating themselves from what they consider to be the unpleasantness of mass tourism. For the New Moral Tourist, mass tour- ism is characterised by sameness, crudeness, destruc- tion and modernity. In contrast to this, New Moral Tourists associate themselves with difference, cultural sophistication, construction and a critical attitude towards ‘modern progress’ (Butcher 2003: 22). Hav- ing acquired these esteemed qualities, these tourists consider their consumption as no longer part of what destroys a visited country’s natural and cultural diver- sity; rather, their consumption contributes to solutions that guarantee cultural and natural diversity protec- tion and preservation. Butcher also points out that New Moral Tourism can be described as a form of ‘ethical
171DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
consumption’ (Butcher 2003: 103)6. The concept of eth- ical consumption is based on the traditional concept of ethics, where ethics is tasked with the rational ground- ing of moral judgements, and so understands itself as a moral undertaking and considers itself to be morally good without question (Luhmann 1991: 85).
New Moral Tourists seek meaningful experiences and the acquisition of a personal understanding of global problems. Responding to (and at the same time stimulating) the rising demand for ethical consump- tion are not only small-scale tour companies and NGO aid projects, but also luxury travel companies such as ‘Abercrombie & Kent’ which organise trips to projects supported by the travel company and NGOs all over the world. These organised tours, often labelled as social, community or volunteer tourism, provide conscien- tious travellers with non-intrusive and sustainable ways to experience a country. It is not surprising, giv- en such a background, that large as well as small tour companies are setting up businesses in slums.
Our research shows that providers of slum tours ex- plicitly or implicitly promote their tours as forms of ethical consumption. They do this in several ways: (1) by advertising their tours as meaningful experi- ences that will raise social awareness and develop a firm understanding of poverty; (2) by consciously dis- tinguishing their products from tourist programmes that focus only on glamour and luxury, which they label as common and superficial; (3) by highlighting instances of their co-operation with slum communi- ties; and (4) by declaring that benevolent objectives motivate their undertakings. For example, tours of- ten aim to show that part of the income they generate is diverted into the slum community; during tours, guides often encourage tour participants to play an active role in helping slum residents. In Cape Town, during township tours participants are given numer- ous possibilities for buying souvenirs or (locally pro- duced) arts and crafts. Additionally, during visits to social institutions tourists are offered opportunities for making financial donations. In Mumbai, Reality Tours and Travel donates 80 % of its profits to its sis- ter company, Reality Gives and markets itself explic- itly as an ethical tour company. Of the respondents in Mumbai, nearly all expressed a desire to understand how people in the Global South live, but only a few expressed the desire to have an impact on the issues faced by these people: “But I think that the reality is that the vast majority of people who live in the cities live in that sort of condition, and if you don’t want
to learn about it or be exposed to it, then you have no wish to make an impact or to make it better”. By referring to slum tourism as a form of ethical con- sumption, tourists as well as slum tour providers successfully distinguish themselves from conven- tional tourists and conventional tourist programme providers; they also contradict the central argument proposed by critics of slum tourism.
5. Conclusion
The presented results highlight that tourist destinations such as slums or townships are frequently the subject of moral communication. Furthermore, it becomes evident that there is a link between the semantic field surround- ing the places slum or township and the moral judge- ment of visiting such places in the context of tourism. Notions which surround slums and townships, such as exclusion, insecurity and stagnation, as well as their pos- itive counterparts, creativity, culture, community and development, are all morally charged concepts, implying moral judgements of good and bad. Consequently, poor urban quarters can be considered as bad places and as good places, depending on whether they are linked with negative or positive connotations.
The notions surrounding these poor urban quarters constitute the conditions which determine whether esteem or disesteem is accorded to the social agents involved in the praxis of slum and township tourism. If slums and townships are considered to be places of hardship and despair, where people live in dirt, vegetate in poverty and starve to death, and if tour- ists are brought into these places, then naturally the impression develops that exploitation occurs; spe- cifically that the privacy and dignity of slum dwellers is violated. This notion is exemplified by situations where slum tours are described using the metaphors of a zoo or a safari tour, in which slum dwellers are equated with zoo or safari animals. Such perspectives characterise slum residents as powerless, lethargic and wretched, and imply that they do not want con- tact with Westerners or tourists. In contrast, if slums and townships are considered to be places of culture, development and hope and where people are extreme- ly active and creative finding and applying ways for coping with their lives, then a different light is shed on slum tourism. From such a perspective, slum and township tours provide opportunities for gaining a different understanding of poverty and provide sup- port for slum residents and the efforts they make
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
172 DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
towards improving their living conditions. In such a context, slum tourism can be considered a form of responsible tourism, and tourists who participate in slum tours no longer appear as civilisation-weary voyeurs; rather, they appear as a kind of aid work- ers with moral integrity whose presence in a slum or township is morally integrated.
The social praxis of slum tourism is laced with moral communication; the binary code good/bad is used, but is at the same time pointless. Slum tourism can be observed as philanthropic and helpful, or voyeur- istic and exploitative. As the programmes outlining the rules for evaluating specific behaviours as good or bad are no longer prescribed by religion, and be- cause – so far – no substitute can be found, there is a lack of consensus about the criteria assigning the val- ues good and bad. Moral communication is still claim- ing to speak for society, but in a poly-contextual world this cannot happen unanimously. As our empirical re- search on slum tourism, morality and place illustrates, modern society is characterised by an individualisa- tion of moral perspectives (Luhmann 1998: 248).
Notes
1 To summarise the countries where slum tourism t akes place, the term ‘Global South’ is used in this ar ticle for at least t wo reasons: First, the notion “ developing coun- tries” should be avoided, because it has the negative connot ation of “underdevelopment ”. Moreover, the term ‘Global South’ bet ter t akes account of the multiple glob- al linkages and socio-economic fragment ations in the (mega)cities in the so-called ‘developing countries’ (cf. Doevenspeck and Laske 2013: 261).
2 In this article the term ‘place’ is used with reference to the German term Raum. But there is also a conceptual proxim- ity to the term as it is used in the Geographical Concepts: „A place is a specific part of the Earth’s surface that has been named and given meaning by people, although these mean- ings may differ” (Lambert 2013: 176).
3 Freire-Medeiros (2007); Rolfes et al. (2009); Rolfes (2010); Meschkank (2011)
4 Different from MacCannell (1976) and in accordance with more recent research (Cohen 1988; Bruner 1994; Wang 1999) we do not understand these alleged authentic or true places as essentialist entities, but rather as social construc- tions. Authenticity is not a given characteristic of any object
or place, but rather a characteristic ascribed by a specific observer for a specific purpose.
5 “Here is a list of pairs of contradicting words. Tick spon- taneously which of the following words do better describe the township”.
6 In our analysis we took account of positive articles (Kubisch 2008; Collins 2009; Damon 2009; Hansen 2009; Frank 2010; Robertson 2012) and also of more critical views (Gentleman 2006; Wertz 2009; Odede 2010). Many of the articles investi- gated show an ambiguous attitude, presenting arguments both for and against this form of tourism (Lancaster 2007; Weiner 2008; Rice 2009; Richardson 2009; Swanson 2011; Basu 2012).
References
AP 2007: Township tourism booming as visitors want to see ‘real’ South Africa. – International Herald Tribune, Africa & Middle East, 3 January 2007. – Online available at: http:// www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2007-01-04-south- africa-township-tourism_x.htm, 15/05/2012
Basu, M. 2012: Poverty tours: A learning experience or simply gawking? – CNN, 22/05/2011. – Online available at: http:// edition.cnn.com/2012/05/22/travel/india-poverty-tour- ism/index.html, 15/05/2012
Baumann, Z. 2000: Liquid modernity. – Cambridge Bruner, E.-M. 1994: Abraham Lincoln as authentic reproduc-
tion: A critique of postmodernism. – American Anthropol- ogist 96 (2): 397-415.
Butcher, J. 2003: The moralisation of tourism. Sun, sand and saving the world. – London et al.
Cohen, E. 1988: Authenticity and commodization in tour- ism. – Annals of Tourism Research 15 (3): 371-386
Collins, V. 2009: Slum tours: Traveling off the beaten path. Slum tours offer travelers an authentic, offbeat look at foreign cul- tures – and locals a new way to make a living. – Odewire, 01/04/2009. – Online available at: http://odewire.com/60395/ slum-tours-traveling-off-the- beaten-path.html, 15/05/2012
Damon, A. 2009: Slum tourism: Visitors see the ‘real’ Jakar- ta. – CNN Asia, 30/07/2009. – Online available at: http:// edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/07/29/indonesia. slum.tourism/, 15/05/2012
Doevenspeck, M. und J. Laske 2013: Entwicklung, Entwick- lungsforschung und Geographie. – In: Rolfes, M. und A. Uhlenwinkel (Hrsg.): Metzler Handbuch 2.0 Geographie- unterricht. Ein Leitfaden für Praxis und Ausbildung. – Braunschweig: 255-266
Dürr, E. and R. Jaffe 2012: Theorizing slum tourism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Performing, negotiating and transforming inequality. – Revista Europea de Estu-
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
173DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
dios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe / European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 93: 113-123
Dürr, E. 2012: Urban poverty, spatial representation and mo- bility. Touring a slum in Mexico. – International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36 (4): 706-724
Elsrud, T. 2001: Risk creation in travelling: Backpacker adven- ture narration. – Annals of Tourism Research 28 (3): 597-617
Ermann, U. und M. Redepenning 2010: Gute Räume – schlechte Räume? Zum Verhältnis von Moral und Raum in der Geo- graphie. – Geographische Revue 12 (1): 5-20
Farías, I. 2008: Touring Berlin: Virtual destination, tourist communication and the multiple city. – Berlin
Frank, R. 2010: Slum tours for the wealthy come under scruti- ny. – The Wall Street Journal, 01/02/2010. – Online available at: http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2010/02/01/slum-tours-for- the-wealthy-come-under-scrutiny/, 15/05/2012
Freire-Medeiros, B. 2007: A favela que se vê e que se vende. Reflexões e polêmicas em torno de um destino turístico. – Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 22 (65): 62-72
Freire-Medeiros, B. 2009: The favela and its touristic transits. – Geoforum 40 (4): 580-588
Frenzel, F., K. Koens and M. Steinbrink (eds.) 2012: Slum tourism. Poverty, power and ethics. – New York et al.
Gentleman, A. 2006: Slum tours: A day trip too far? – The Observer, 07/05/2006. – Online available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ travel/2006/may/07/delhi.india.ethicalliving, 15/05/2012
Hansen, S. 2009: Bei den ‚Slumdogs‘. Ein engagiertes Reise- büro führt Touristen durch das indische Armutsviertel Dharavi. – Taz, 03/06/2009. – Online available at: http:// w w w.t az.de/4/reise/asien/indien/ar t ikelseite/1/ bei- den-slumdogs/, 15/05/2012
Jaguaribe, B. and K. Hetherington 2004: Favela tours: Indis- tinct and mapless representations of the real in Rio de Ja- neiro. – In: Sheller, M. and J. Urry (eds.): Tourism mobilities. Places to play, places in play. – London: 155-166
Kubisch, B. 2008: Slum-Tourismus in Namibia: Auf ein Bier zu Saddam. – Spiegel Online, 11/09 2008. – On- line available at: http://www.spiegel.de/reise/fern- weh/0,1518,573848,00.html, 15/05/2012
Lambert, D. 2013: Geographical Concepts. – In: Rolfes, M. and A. Uhlenwinkel (eds.): Metzler Handbuch 2.0 Geogra- phieunterricht. Ein Leitfaden für Praxis und Ausbildung, Braunschweig: 174-181
Lancaster, J. 2007: Next stop, squalor. Is poverty tourism “poorism”, they call it exploration or exploitation? – Smith- sonian, 03/2007. – Online available at: http://www.smith- sonianmag.com/people-places/squalor.html, 15/05/2012
Lippuner, R. und J. Lossau 2004: Geographie und spatial turn. – Erdkunde 58 (3): 201-211
Luhmann, N. 1991: Paradigm lost. On the ethical ref lection of morality. Speech on the occasion of the award of the Hegel Prize 1988. – Thesis Eleven 29: 82-94
Luhmann, N. 1998: Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. – Frankfurt a.M.
Luhmann, N. 2008: Die Moral der Gesellschaft. – Frankfurt a. M. MacCannell, D. 1976: The tourist: A new theory of the leisure
class. – London Matthews, A. 2008: Negotiated selves: Exploring the impact
of local-global interactions on young volunteer travel- lers. – In: Lyons, K.D. and S. Wearing (eds.): Journeys of discovery in volunteer tourism: International case study perspectives. – Oxfordshire: 101-117
Meschkank, J. 2011: Investigations into slum tourism in Mumbai. – GeoJournal 76 (1): 47-62
Meschkank, J. 2012: Negotiating poverty. The interplay between Dharavi’s production and consumption as a tourist destination. – In: Frenzel, F., K. Koens and M. Stein- brink (eds.): Slum tourism. Poverty, power and ethics. – New York et al.: 144-158
Meschkank, J. 2013: Dhavari – ein Ort der Armut? Untersu- chungen zum Slumtourismus in Mumbai. – Potsdamer Geographische Praxis 4
Odede, K. 2010: Slumdog tourism. – The New York Times, 09/08/2012. – Online available at: http://www.nytimes. com/2010/08/10/opinion/10odede.html, 15/05/2012
Pott, A. 2007: Orte des Tourismus: Eine raum- und gesell- schaftstheoretische Untersuchung. – Bielefeld
Ramchander, P. 2007: Township tourism: Blessing or blight? The case of Soweto in South Africa. – In: Richards, G. (ed.): Cultural tourism: Global and local perspectives. – New York: 39-67
Rice, X. 2009: Kenya’s slums attract poverty tourism. Tour- ists snapping up £20 guided walks around Nairobi’s open- sewer streets. – The Guardian, 25/09/2009. – Online available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/ sep/25/slum-tourism-kenya-kibera-poverty, 15/05/2012
Richardson, N. 2009: Slumdog millionaire: On the trail of Mumbai’s slumdogs. – The Telegraph, 22/01/2009. – On- line available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/ destinations/asia/india/4306996/Slumdog-Millionaire- on-the-trail-of-Mumbais-slumdogs.html, 15/05/2012
Robertson, L. 2012: Do “slum tours” profit of the poor? – BBC Travel, Ethical Traveller column 2012. – Online available at: http://www.bbc.com/travel/blog/20120307-ethical- travellerdoslumtoursprofitoffthepoor, 15/05/2012
Rolfes, M. 2010: Poverty tourism: Theoretical ref lections and empirical findings regarding an extraordinary form of tourism. – GeoJournal 75 (5): 421-442
Rolfes, M., M. Steinbrink and C. Uhl 2009: Townships as at- traction. An empirical study of township tourism in Cape Town. – Praxis Kultur- und Sozialgeographie 46. – Potsdam
Sack, R.D. 1999: A sketch of a geographic theory of moral- ity. – Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (1): 26-44
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
174 DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
Smith, D.M. 2000: Moral geographies: Ethics in a world of difference. – Edinburgh
Steinbrink, M. and K. Frehe 2008: Township-Tourismus in Kapstadt. To go or no go? – Praxis Geographie 12: 38-43
Steinbrink, M. und A. Pott 2010: Global Slumming. Zur Genese und Globalisierung des Armutstourismus. – In: Wöhler, K., A. Pott und V. Denzer (Hrsg.)s.): Tourismus- räume. Zur soziokulturellen Konstruktion eines globalen Phänomens. – Bielefeld: 247-270
Swanson, J. 2011: The pros and cons of slum tourism. All in favor of the real-life set of “Slumdog Millionaire” becom- ing a tourist attraction. – CNN GO, 16/05/2011. – Online available at: http://www.cnngo.com/mumbai/play/pros- and-cons-slum-tourism-723332, 15/05/2012
United Nations Human Settlements Programme 2006/2007: The state of the world’s cities 2006/2007. The millennium
development goals and urban sustainabilities. 30 years of shaping the Habitat Agenda. – London
Urbain, J.-D. 1993: El idiota que viaja (relatos de turistas). – Madrid
Wang, N. 1999: Rethinking authenticity in tourism experi- ence. – Annals of Tourism Research 26 (2): 349-370
Wang, N. 2000: Tourism and modernity: a sociological ana- lysis. – New York
Weiner, E. 2008: Slum visits: Tourism or voyeurism? – New York Times, 09/03/2008. – Online available at: http:// t r a v e l . n y t i m e s . c o m / 2 0 0 8/0 3/0 9/ t r a v e l /0 9 h e a d s . html?ref=ericweiner, 15/05/2012
Wertz, A. 2009: Safari ins Elend? – Der Freitag, 05/04/2009. – Online available at: http://www.freitag. de/polit ik/0914 -slum-tour ismus-reiseunter nehmer- rio, 15/05/2012
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
case you need to use/Slikker Koens - Breaking the Silence .pdf
See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/280631563
“Breaking the Silence”: Local Perceptions of Slum Tourism in Dharavi
ARTICLE in TOURISM REVIEW INTERNATIONAL · JULY 2015
DOI: 10.3727/154427215X14327569678876
READS
33
2 AUTHORS, INCLUDING:
Ko Koens
Breda University of Applied Sciences
15 PUBLICATIONS 56 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE
All in-text references underlined in blue are linked to publications on ResearchGate,
letting you access and read them immediately.
Available from: Ko Koens
Retrieved on: 02 December 2015
1
‘Breaking the Silence’ - Local perceptions of slum tourism in Dharavi
Nieck Slikker1* & Ko Koens2
1 Graduate International Tourism Management, Stenden University of Applied Sciences - Rogakker 3, 6741 ES, Lunteren, Tel: +31 6 22 515491, E-mail: [email protected] 2 Academy of Hotel and Facility Management, NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences; School of Tourism and Hospitality; Faculty of Management, University of Johannesburg. - Sibeliuslaan 13, 4837 CA, Breda, Tel: +31 6 4544 0674, Fax: +31 (0)76 530 2785, E-mail: [email protected]
2
‘Breaking the Silence’ - Local perceptions of slum tourism in Dharavi
Abstract
Slum tourism has been criticised for potentially exploiting the communities it visits. While the daily life
of residents is the primary attraction of slum tourism, they do not receive any remuneration. Given the
heated debate surrounding this topic, it is surprising that the perspective of residents remains largely
unknown. This paper aims to address this lacuna, by providing insights into the perceptions that
residents have on slum tourism in Dharavi slum, India. It is unique in that it explicitly addresses host
perceptions towards slum tourism enterprises as well as charitable activities funded through slum
tourism. Insights were gained through 74 semi-structured interviews, conducted in the most visited
areas of the slum. Four different resident perspectives are recognised; apprehensive, positive,
indifferent and sceptical. Over time, residents in Dharavi become less excited by the presence of
tourists, but they do not develop a negative attitude to them. Although residents are not without
criticism of tourism and there is a lack of knowledge on tourism’s contribution to community
development projects, they do not view tourism as exploitative. The struggle for Dharavi will be to
ensure tour operators will continue to operate in a way sensitive to the local community, as tourist
numbers and competition increases.
Keywords: Slum Tourism; Dharavi; local perceptions; resident perspective; tourism ethics
3
Introduction
Twenty years after its onset, international slum tourism - where tourists from the global North visit
impoverished urban areas in the global South - remains a highly controversial phenomenon. (Frenzel &
Koens, 2012; Steinbrink, 2012). Reports on the concept in popular media almost inevitably result in an
ethical discussion regarding its presumed exploitative nature, in which local community members are
misrepresented and receive only limited benefits (see e.g. CCTV, 2014; Hanrahan, 2013). For example,
Indian government until recently discouraged slum tourism, as it was viewed to misrepresent the
country and undermine the status of other tourism attractions (Basu, 2012). Other countries take a
more positive stance to slum tourism development though. In South Africa government supports
township tourism for its potential of providing provides economic benefits and stimulate local economic
development (Koens & Thomas, in press).
Given the diversity in perspectives regarding the impact of slum tourism on local residents, it is
surprising how little research has focused on the perception of the host community. There are plenty of
examples of work on host perceptions in other contexts (Nunkoo, Smith, & Ramkissoon, 2013), but in
slum tourism, where the impoverished living conditions of host community members are a primary
attraction, such work is missing (Burgold, Frenzel, & Rolfes, 2013; Rolfes, 2010). Slum tourism arguably
gives voice to slum tourism residents, but their voice cannot be heard in academic writing. The lack of
work on resident perspectives can be attributed to the intensive nature of such research and language
barriers between researcher and residents (Freire-Medeiros, 2010; Frisch, 2012). Understandably as
these reasons are, it does mean that the host community perspective hardly is taken into account in the
debate on ethics in slum tourism.
This paper aims to deal with this issue by providing deeper insights into the residents’ perceptions
towards slum tourism, through a research investigation set in Dharavi, India. More specifically, its
objectives are: 1) to investigate differences in perceptions among Dharavi residents and their
development over time; 2) To explore resident perceptions of the ‘Reality Group’, the first and the
largest company to organise commercial slum tours in Dharavi. The Reality Group is unique in that it
operates as a social enterprise and invests a large share of their profits back into the Dharavi community
through a sister NGO called‘ Reality Gives’, as well as other local NGOs. This makes it a suitable company
to investigate as it helps provide insights into both commercial slum tourism as well as charitable
practices related to it.
4
Appreciating resident perceptions in tourism
One of the earliest studies on the relationship between tourism and residents’ perceptions comes from
Doxey (1975). In his Irridex model he proposed that residents initially are euphoric when tourism comes
to an area, and that their support gradually deteriorates until they actively oppose its further
development. The trend of increasingly negative attitudes towards tourism has been confirmed in other
work, albeit not without qualifications. In particular, it has been argued that there is a negative bias in
work on this subject and that positive perceptions remain underreported (McKercher & Prideaux, 2014,
p. 21). Also, it cannot be assumed that host communities are homogeneous and that their perceptions
develop in a linear way over time (Moyle, Croy, & Weiler, 2010; Nunkoo et al., 2013). To better
appreciate host attitudes, it is useful to distinguish between different groups of residents. Where such
work has been done, residents’ attitudes range from ‘lovers’ to those who ‘hate’ tourism to their
community (Williams & Lawson, 2001). .Although results differ per location, in most areas a little under
half of the population perceives tourism positively, while up to a third can have a deeply negative
perception (Sharpley, 2014, p. 45).
The fact that the majority of work discusses established tourism destinations in the developed world, is
a weakness of the current literature (Harrill, 2004, p. 263). Work on newly emerging destinations in
Uganda and Indonesia highlight how the reaction to the initial development of tourism was one of
suspicion, anxiety and fear, rather than excitement, particularly if tourists commit social and cultural
blunders (Cole, 1997; Lepp, 2008). Only after residents had acquired a basic understanding of tourism,
did they become more positive.
Increasingly exchange theory is used to appreciate resident perceptions (Nunkoo et al., 2013). Exchange
theory focuses on “understanding the exchange of resources between individuals and groups in an
interaction situation’’ (Ap, 1992, p. 668). When people engage in an interaction process, their
satisfaction with the exchange depends on a perception of the overall outcome (i.e. whether they have
gained something of worth through it, be it material, social or psychological). Placed in a tourism
context, this means that “an individual’s attitudes toward this industry, and subsequent level of support
for its development, will be influenced by his or her evaluation of resulting outcomes in the community”
(Andereck, Valentine, Knopf, & Vogt, 2005, p. 1061). Residents who perceive benefits from tourism or
expect benefits in the near-future are more likely to have positive perceptions than those who do not
(Deery, Jago, & Fredline, 2012; Smith and Krannich, 1998).
5
Social exchange theory has proven useful to appreciate host perspectives, for example, on the subject of
community support through financial donations. These have been criticised for focusing only on short-
term community gain, without providing long-term benefits (Ashley & Haysom, 2006; Obalola, 2008),
particularly when donations are used by companies for promotional activities (e.g. to improve brand
image or increase sales), residents can start to view the exchange as uneven and local support can
dwindle. The same can happen when only certain individuals within the community benefit and others
are left behind (Andereck et al., 2005; Mbaiwa, 2005; Polonsky et al., 2013, p. 379).
Historically, social exchange theory has focused strongly on economic benefits, while social and cultural
aspects have remained relatively underdeveloped (McGehee & Meares, 1998). Although they are
becoming more integrated in recent work (e.g. Brida, Chiappa, Meleddu, & Pulina, 2014; Nunkoo &
Ramkissoon, 2010), this remains a weakness. It has been suggested that, to further theoretical
development of social exchange theory, more work is needed on the social and cultural aspects of
exchanges, particularly in developing countries (Sirakaya, Teye, & Sönmez, 2002; Wang & Pfister, 2008).
As discussed below slum tourism, could be a useful setting to do this.
Local perspectives on slum tourism
Slum tourism is increasingly popular and in destinations like Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro it has all but
become part of mainstream tourism (Frenzel & Koens, 2012). Although differences can be observed
between slum tourism offerings in different localities, one thing that unites them, is the importance
placed on experiencing local life, as lived by economically poor local residents. More than with other
forms of tourism, residents are key to the slum tourism product. This may be why slum tours have come
under so much criticism for being voyeuristic and potentially exploitative (Butler, 2012; Chhabra &
Chowdhury, 2012). Slum tourism operators on the other hand stress their efforts to contribute to the
economic and social progress within the visited community (Dyson, 2012). While these ideals may be
genuine, they can be difficult to operationalise in a context of strong economic pressure and
competition (Koens and Tomas, in press), and may not be observed as such by the visited communities.
Academic research on host communities in slum tourism literature has primarily focused on direct
individual economic benefits. It confirms that community members who gain economically from slum
tourism, commonly have positive stance towards it (Duarte, 2010). Opportunities for economic gain in
slum tourism largely remains limited to a minority of the community however (Freire-Medeiros, 2010).
6
The opinion of other community members, who do not economically benefit, is not entirely clear. On
the whole, they appear tolerant towards tourism particularly when they feel tourism can stimulate the
development of the ‘slum’ they live. In a small minority of cases, residents seek out a conversation with
tourists, although language barriers commonly mean such conversations have to be mitigated by a
guide, thus losing their spontaneity (Meschkank, 2011; Søderstrøm, 2014). Residents do criticise the
content of the tours and the sights that are visited (Duarte, 2010; Freire-Medeiros, 2010). In particular
they have issues issue with the ways in which slum tourism causes local culture and poverty to be
commercialised and exploited for personal financial gains by a minority (Ramchander, 2004), or they
complain about invasions of privacy without personal remuneration (Søderstrøm, 2014). There also is a
lot of unawareness regarding slum tourism among residents. A study on favela tourism, for example,
showed that three quarters of all residents are not fully aware that favela tourism companies are
commercial enterprises that make money off visiting their community (Freire-Medeiros, 2012). Possibly,
if they would, their perception would be more negative.
While these findings are interesting, they provide only limited analytical insights to the ways in which
residents experience slum tourism. Furthermore, work has focused on township and favela tourism,
while increasingly popular slums like Dharavi have received much less attention.
Slum tourism in Dharavi
The tour operator ‘Reality Tours and Travel’ (RTT) officially started operating slum tours in Dharavi, the
largest slum in Mumbai, in 2006. RTT has grown rapidly since then and now provides tours for over
17.000 tourists annually. At the same a growing number of other, smaller, tour operators and
independent guides have become active. While RTT is still market leader, with an estimated market
share of 85%, the number of people using these new slum tour companies is growing and over 20.000
tourists now visit Dharavi annually. This is a strong increase over the estimated 1500 to 3500 tourists
visiting the area five years ago (Rolfes, 2010, p. 436). During high season over eight tours per day are run
and tourists have become a familiar sight.
“We see them daily. We can’t be certain if the sun will shine tomorrow. However, one thing is
certain; the tourists will surely be there. It’s always certain we will see them. (Female, age 26,
housewife)”
7
The approximate length of most tours is three kilometres and they cross through multiple ‘nagars’
(neighbourhoods), each with their own community and characteristics. The areas differ in religion,
hygiene, public facilities, maintenance, type of industry, size of living space and more. Slum tourism in
Dharavi focuses on the vibrancy of the community, including the ‘commercial versatility and
industriousness of the inhabitants’ (Rolfes, 2009, pp. 437–438). While the tours pass through
impoverished areas, the narrative is upbeat and aimed at making tourists’ leave with a more positive
picture of the Dharavi community. Also, as the largest company, RTT emphasises their tours need to be
respectful to the local community and they have set up a dress code that tourists need to adhere to
(Dyson, 2012).
A the time of the research RTT was the only tour operator in Dharavi to structurally invest its profits into
social projects and NGOs that support the community as part of its business model. The Realty Group
has founded a sister NGO ‘Reality Gives’ (RG) to develop this aspect of their work and won a World
Responsible Tourism Award in 2012, strengthening its public credentials as an socially responsible
company. At the moment of conducting the research, RG operated 6 community support projects
themselves, while it also financially supported seven projects run by local NGOs. The Reality Group also
deliberately hires people from deprived backgrounds, albeit not only from Dharavi. In this way the
company tries to ensure an equal exchange with the community. However, they are largely unaware
whether they succeed at this, given that they find it difficult to get feedback from the community (Al
Jazeera, 2013).
Methodological considerations
This research uses a qualitative approach to explore the perceptions of residents to slum tourism in
general as well as Reality Group. In this way it seeks to go beyond previous work on community
perceptions that used exchange theory in combination with a quantitative cross-sectional methodology
(Nunkoo et al., 2013; Zhang, Inbakaran, & Jackson, 2006). Weaknesses of such work is that it tends to
view communities as homogenous entities and that they limits respondents to a particular direction
(Beeton, 2006). By employing a qualitative approach, it is possible to have respondents “drive the
analysis, rather than the research dictating the focus” (Moyle et al., 2010, p. 360).
Data gathering took place between August and October 2013. Although the research is focused primarily
on efforts from the ‘Reality Group’, it also takes into account tours from other companies. A total of 74
8
face-to-face interviews were conducted with adult members of the Dharavi community, who lived or
worked along the route of ‘Reality Tours’ and its attractions. Participants were purposefully sought out
to reflect the diversity that exists within the community, although in some cases snowball sampling was
employed to gain access. Research was focused on individuals of ages 17 and older, as it was imperative
that respondents had a wider perception of things evolving in their communities. None of the
respondents were directly involved or financially benefitted from tourism, and all gave consent to be
interviewed.
Interviews lasted between 30 to 45 minutes. A general interview guide was used to structure the
interviews, although respondents were stimulated to talk freely during the interview. Interviews started
with a general introduction, following which they were asked about their background and profession.
The interview then focused on the moment respondents first noted tourists coming to their
neighbourhood – commonly just after RTT started operating - and their initial perceptions. After this,
they were asked how they currently perceive slum tourism to their area, and to reflect on possible
changes in their perception. Although it is appreciated that this is not the most reliable way of
measuring changing perceptions, it introduces an indicative longitudinal element to the study that helps
clarify resident perceptions. The discussion turned towards the tour operators performing these tours,
with an emphasis on RTT and RG. Respondents were asked if they were aware of the different
operators, as well as what their thoughts were on the goals and aims of the organisations. When
respondents did not know RTT and/or RG, their goals and aims were explained, to further fuel the
discussion.
Because hardly any respondents spoke English, interviews were conducted with the help of three
interpreter guides. The use of an interpreter, in combination with the background of the interviewing
researcher (a Caucasian male) is likely to have influenced research results. The following measures were
taken to minimise negative impacts (following Freire-Medeiros, 2012; Gray, 2013; Lepp, 2008; Vanden
Berg, 2014). Firstly, potential issues that could arise during interviews were discussed with a variety of
local actors and the interviewing researcher kept a field diary to continuously reflect on the interview
process. The interview guide was translated into Hindi to ensure interviews would be conducted in a
similar way and interpreters were given a training on the process of conducting an interview. Finally,
three trial interviews were held in Dharavi, during which all interpreters were present. In general the
research process went well, although the translation from English to Hindi at times somewhat disrupted
9
the flow of the interview and three respondents were not very fluent in Hindi, which meant questions
had to be repeated often.
Analysis of the research was done using a basic grounded approach, although it was informed by an
initial understanding of slum tourism and Dharavi. Following Braun and Clarke (2006), interviews were
recorded and transcribed in English, after which an initial phase of open coding was performed.
Following this, themes based on the most common responses from the interview were recognised,
reviewed, redefined and related back to the literature (Ritchie, Lewis, Nicholls, & Ormston, 2013).
Dharavi residents’ perceptions of tourism
When asked how they feel about tourism, most respondents note that they and happy and proud that
people are interested in their community. The foreign interest in their way of life is seen as very positive
and respondents believe that tours highlight the positive aspects of Dharavi, rather than focus on the
negative aspects of poverty. Respondents generally speak of tourists as well-mannered and they seek to
return the favour. In line with Indian cultural reasoning, they treat their ‘guests’ with the highest
respect.
“I was a bit surprised, because I was wondering why they were coming here. At the same time I
thought in the back of my head ‘He’s my guest, he’s coming to my country, my place. He’s my
guest, so similar to a God. So I have to give something to him.’ (Male, age 41, owner of a soap
factory) “
One particular aspect that is appreciated, is that children now have an opportunity to deal with foreign
visitors. Even when interaction is incredibly limited and goes little further than tourists waving and
giving greetings, respondents still believe that tourism helps improve the level of English of children. The
sweets or biscuits that tourists incidentally hand out, are also viewed in a positive light. As one
respondent mentions: ‘when the children are happy because of the tourists, the parents are happy too
(Female, age 26, former catering worker).’
It is striking that hardly any respondents mention the potential for individual financial gain or
employment as a positive aspect of tourism in Dharavi. Respondents do mention that operators should
do more to help the community. They feel it would only be fair for companies to give something back, as
they are exploiting the amenities of the community. However, even critical respondents largely have a
10
positive attitude towards tourism to Dharavi. This suggests that, at the moment, the non-economic
benefits of tourism provide sufficient benefits for the majority of respondents, to make them perceive
tourism positively.
Residents may see tourists on a daily basis, but there is little interaction between the two groups. The
limited contact is partially because of language barriers and because the tours are run on a tight
schedule, with limited time to stop. On the other hand residents also note that they are simply too busy
with work and survival and that interaction with tourists is not really on their agenda.
“We are busy with our own work and they are busy with their things. But we are quite happy,
because tourists here in India are guests, and guests are treated like god.”(Male, age 65, retired,
Maharashtra; Dharavi)
While this interviewee remains positive, there is relatively large group that is indifferent to tourism.
They recognise tourism has only limited impact on their lives and do not care whether tourists come or
not, as long as they are not bothered by them.
Respondents do recognise that tourism can potentially harm the community. For example, residents
express their concern about the safety of the tourists. One industrial area that is visited, is not without
risk, and tourists could harm themselves when they make their way past or through the various little
factories. Owners of factories are afraid tourists might get hurt and that this would result in law suits or
a police raid. The owners would rather have the tourists not entering the industries, or they would like
the guide to ask for permission to the owner first. However, they also feel a sense of moral obligation to
show off the hospitality of Dharavi, and do not prevent tour groups from entering.
Tourist safety is not the only worry that residents have about tourism. A minority of respondents believe
that tourists stain the name of Dharavi, as poverty and bad hygiene is used for entertainment, or
because they fear tourists want to discover illegal activities (e.g. child labour, informal industries).
“I thought ‘Why are they coming here?! What is there to see? They should go to the Gateway of
India, or some better place to see’. I just thought they came here to make fun of us, of our living
conditions here. (Male, age 35, owner of an aluminium compound factory)”
11
Although on the whole, residents feel the tours are operated with respect for the community, there are
respondents who fear that tour operators deliberately depict Dharavi in a negative way, and that the
guides provide tourists with incorrect information, to make the tour appear more spectacular.
“I think that the guides are not giving the right information about this place. For example at the
toilet over there. Every day only 30 to 50 people use that toilet, but the guide says that more
than a thousand people use that toilet. That’s false information and we don’t like that” (Male,
age 20, tailor, Maharashtra; Dharavi)
Contrary to what might have been expected on the basis of earlier research (Chhabra & Chowdhury,
2012), residents do not mention they find the tours explicitly voyeuristic. However, they do mention
other aspects that relate to this. A specific complaint has to do with the use of photo cameras on tours.
Although RTT has a strict camera policy and, for example, does not allow any photography during certain
parts of the tours, residents still worry about photography on slum tours. They fear that tourist photos
will harm the community. Such sentiments are not unfounded. A photo of the garbage area, which was
taken during a tour, once ended up in a newspaper, strongly offending the inhabitants. Also, Papadum
producers in one part of Dharavi lost much business, after a photo in the media caused outsiders
question the hygiene of their Papadum production.
In spite of the fact that RTT has a tourist dress code, ten respondents believe that female tourists should
wear more appropriate clothing, as their current dress is too revealing (e.g. bare shoulders, bare knees
or too much cleavage).
“[…] some women wear appropriate clothing, but many women come here wearing shorts or
things like that. So if the guys or our husbands see that, we don’t like that. We feel bad then. The
men start looking at them and we think ‘Why can’t they dress more like us?’ (Females, ages 39,
43 and 44, housewives)”
The idea of appropriate dressing actually may point to a more general generational conflict within
Dharavi that is exacerbated by tourism. Younger respondents are more positive about the dress code
and, in fact, view it as a form of progress. Two respondents even have started to copy the way tourists
dress.
12
After further analysis of the interviews four different perspectives toward tourism have been discerned
that captivate the different perceptions: apprehensive, positive, indifferent and sceptical ( 1).
Respondents found it difficult to remember their initial perceptions of tourism and therefore have, in 15
cases, been classified in multiple categories. While the sample used in this research is not necessarily
representative and the perspectives represent a simplification, they still are useful to indicate how
Dharavi residents view tourism. It is also useful to explore how tourism perceptions develop over time.
Figure 1: Initial and current perception of respondents to slum tourism in Dharavi
Source: research findings
13
Residents who display an apprehensive perception, emphasise the fact that tourism to Dharavi is
unusual. They question its purpose as well as the intention of tourists. A lack of knowledge and
familiarity with tourism makes it difficult to appreciate its benefits and drawbacks. This perception is
shared by 35 respondents when they first noticed tourism. They recall their first tourist encounter as
one of shock; two respondents even were scared. Others were intrigued by the white skin of the
tourists, or generally surprised about the fact that tourists would leave their well-established countries
to visit a place of poverty. These reactions are similar to those described by Cole (1997) and Lepp (2008)
in newly established tourism destinations. The number of people who can be classified as apprehensive
at the time of the research has dropped to 12. Largely this can be attributed to a greater knowledge,
familiarity and confidence regarding tourists, due to the increase of tourist numbers.
“The first time I was pretty surprised, but if the same thing is going on over and over, it becomes
normal. I actually thought that there might be some problem in their own country, so they came
to live here. (Male, age 19, student)”
The positive perception can be described as one where residents feel happy or proud about tourism
coming to Dharavi. Respondents who share this perspective see the tourism exchange as positive. They
enjoy seeing tourists, feel tourism brings social benefits, are hopeful that tourism can contribute to a
better future for the Dharavi community as a whole and welcome further tourism development.
Although at first sight only 17 respondents approached tourism with an outright positive perception,
this number has risen to 21. The number has risen mainly due to a respondents who previously had an
apprehensive approach gaining confidence in tourism, although some initially positive respondents had
become indifferent.
When residents have an indifferent perception to tourism, they choose to ignore the tourists or tourist
development. They know about tourism, but do not see it bringing themselves many benefits. Not
excited about tourism, respondents with an indifferent perception focus on other aspects of their lives
(i.e. making a living). As long as it does not negatively affect their lives though, they do not see it as
particularly negative either. Twenty-six respondents had an indifferent perception when they first
encountered tourism in Dharavi, but this number has grown to 35 at the time of the research. Although
this growth can mostly be attributed to people becoming less apprehensive, a small number of residents
who initially had positive and sceptical perceptions also have become indifferent over time.
14
Residents with a sceptical perception are unhappy and with the impact that tourism has on their
community. Although they are not actively trying to disrupt tourism, they are suspicious of the quick
growth of tourist numbers and fear that the benefits for the community may no longer outweigh the
disadvantages. The number of respondents with a sceptical perception has dropped from 11 when they
first encountered tourism in Dharavi, to seven at the time of the research. Those with a sceptical
perspective at the time of the research, relate this mainly to occurrences of unwanted photography or
negative media attention.
Overall, looking at the development of perceptions of tourism over time, the number of respondents
with an apprehensive and sceptical perception has gone down. A greater number of respondents are
now positive, but the number of participants with an indifferent perception has particularly risen. To an
extent this large number of indifferent residents is surprising, as the Reality Group emphasises its efforts
to actively support and benefit the local community. The next section therefore focuses on the
perception of the Reality Group and its charitable work.
Perceptions of the Reality Group and its charitable work
Local awareness of the Reality Group is very low. Even though RTT tries to distinguish itself clearly from
its competitors, and guides of RTT wear company clothing with the name and logo of the company, only
five respondents recognise them as a separate company. This reflects the situation in the Brazilian
favelas, where residents also had great difficulty differentiating between tour operators (Freire-
Medeiros, 2012). It does mean that malpractices of other companies may reflect upon RTT.
When RTT was started, its owner went into Dharavi to promote get people on board and support
tourism by discussing the potential benefits that tourism could bring to the community:
“Krishna (founder) also came here and told the people that if he could show the tourists this
area, then maybe eventually this area would get developed. (Male, age 26, clothing designer)”
Suggestions like these may have raised the hopes of residents and may be one reason for the increasing
indifference among residents who do not see much evidence for the development of the area.
Particularly, RG is very much an unknown entity, with only 16 respondents recognising its projects and
only five linking the work they do to slum tourism activities. This lack of awareness caused multiple
respondents to argue that RTT does nothing to support the community.
15
When respondents were explained the connection between the two parts of the Reality Group and the
different projects, reactions were mixed. Most reacted very positively and appreciate RTT as a company
much more because of it.
“Yes, in my mind a lot has changed. Many companies just earn their money and run away. But
this is a company that does something for the community, even if it is very little. Whoever will
know about this company and the NGO, will pray for this company that they will grow. It’s a very
good thing what they are doing. (Male, age 23, wax printing employee)”
Others however, remain wary wanted to see proof of the projects. One respondent actively questions
the underlying motivation of the Reality Group and sees the community work only as a marketing ploy.
Others would not go this far, but do argue they hear too little about the projects, and feel that the
Reality Group needs to do more to promote what they do. A group of young adult respondents are
annoyed that RTT has involved them too little in their charitable activities, even when tourists have been
brought to ‘their’ places. Others state that residents are involved too little in the assessments of current
or future projects. Similarly, they remark that more transparency should be offered about how funding
is used to rule out corruption.
“Yes, these projects are a very good way to give back to the community. But many people don’t
know about these projects. So they have to go into the community and tell them about it. People
are too busy with their own work and they don’t care what you have to tell them. You have to
build relationships with them. (Male, age 30, yoga therapist)”
It is not just respondents with a sceptical perception to tourism to Dharavi that are wary of the impact of
Reality Gives. It is also mentioned by those with other perceptions. One respondent mentions the high
level of distrust in the community is at least partially caused by a dissatisfaction with the government.
Politicians have regularly come to Dharavi with false promises. This has not only caused residents to lose
faith in politics, but it has also reduced their trust in the work of NGOs and charitable companies. To
overcome this, respondents argue that the impact of projects has to be much more visible within the
community.
Looking at individual projects, the most valued projects relate to education, employment and health.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, female respondents particularly value projects aimed at empowering women or
projects that make the life of primary carers easier (e.g. childcare support). When asked what kinds of
16
projects respondents would further desire, residents point to the need for even more education and
health projects. Additionally, they stress the need for action improving the cleanliness of Dharavi, even
though they are aware that this is largely the responsibility of the government. Although little mention is
made of support projects that directly involve tourists or tourism, residents once again emphasise the
need for greater visibility of the Reality Group in Dharavi.
“I think there should be a Reality Tours & Travel or Reality Gives office in the slum, so that
whatever problem we have, we can go to this office to talk to them”. . (Male, age 23, factory
worker)”
Discussion
Findings highlight a diverse range of opinions and perceptions of tourism. Differences exist between
community members, reflecting the diversity that characterises the Dharavi community. For example,
tourists are generally perceived as friendly, interesting, well behaved and a sign of progress, but some
feel they also cause offence at times. Resident perspectives can be categorized into four main
perceptions: apprehensive, positive, indifferent and sceptical. This categorisation shares a resemblance
with classifications proposed by other authors (Diedrich & García-Buades, 2009; Doxey, 1975; Lepp,
2008).A difference is that, perceptions are not viewed as fixed, but they can instead differ among
community members and they can change over time
If residents have a positive perception of tourism in Dharavi, this is commonly not directly related to
seeking or expecting individual economic benefits, even though they do emphasize the importance of
developing the Dharavi community. Looking at this from a wider social perspective, this fits with the
general mentality of Dharavi, which is largely based on communal self-reliance in the face of largely
absent or ineffective public governance structures (Roy, 2011).Respondents greatly value the social
benefits of tourism. They are proud to show off their neighborhood, enjoy the positive attention and
believe in the educational potential of tourism. Other respondents had a form of ‘live and let live’
perspective on tourism. They did not see it bring any great benefits, but as long as it does not bring too
many negatives, they do not mind its presence. Given these circumstances, they are reluctant to waste
energy on it, given that they feel they can barely exert influence anyway. This finding is similar to favela
tourism (Freire-Medeiros, 2012), but contrasts with Lepp’s (2007) more positive notion among residents
in a small village in Ugunda. The acceptance of tourism should therefore also not be mistaken for
17
unequivocal support. Complaints can be heard and, if slum tourism does not take into account the
perspective of residents and involve them in the growth of tourism, the overall positive perception to
tourism can change. To avoid such a potential situation, transparency of slum tourism companies should
be promoted and the support and involvement of community members should be stimulated (Coles,
Fenclova, & Dinan, 2013; Moyle et.al., 2010).
The overall perception in Dharavi is more positive than commonly observed in other research. After an
initial phase of apprehension, the majority of residents are now positive or relatively indifferent to
tourism. Only a small group is sceptical and, at this point in time, no one openly opposes and acts
against further tourism development. In a way these results therefore provide a counterweight to the
rather negative stance in tourism research against the social impacts of tourism (McKercher & Prideaux,
2014). They show that, although trends towards certain perceptions can be observed, no single
perception is shared within a community, nor is the development of these perceptions strictly linear and
negative, as proposed in Doxey’s (1975) Irridex or similar models.
Respondents feel somewhat disappointed with the lack of community development, even when they
have an overall positive perception of tourism. This is surprising, given that the Reality Group works
hard ensure slum tourism provides net-benefits to the community and Reality Gives runs and supports
multiple projects that aim at uplifting the community. The main issue is however, to make residents
aware of these policies and projects and involve them more. Few residents make the connection
between the commercial tours and the community work done through Reality Gives. Greater awareness
on this matter is likely to increase positive perceptions.
Residents also have great difficulty discerning RTT-tours from their competitors. Up to now new
businesses have been largely started by former guides of RTT. They largely adhere to a similar etiquette
in their tours, but they are more lenient on camera and clothing policies. However, it is precisely these
issues that respondents believe are key negative aspects from tourism. As such, they should not be
ignored if the aim is to maintain a positive perception among residents.
Concluding thoughts
This research is the first to explicitly address relations and host perceptions towards slum tourism
enterprises in India and their charitable activities. As a contribution to research, it provides qualitative
insights into the host perspective to a newly developing destination in the global South, whereas the
18
majority of work on host perceptions has taken place in the developed world and has been is
quantitative in nature (Deery, Jago, & Fredline, 2012; Nunkoo et al., 2013). A diverse range of
perceptions has been unearthed that reflect the diversity in “economic well-being, social background,
cultural and religious heritage and regional identities” that can be observed in Dharavi (Basu, 2012, p.
78). The research contributes to the theoretical development of social exchange theory by reflecting on
the importance of social and cultural benefits. Pride about foreign interest, potential opportunities for
children’s education, respectful narratives regarding the community and the possibility to instigate
change in society all were viewed as benefits, while inappropriate clothing and photography and
potential danger for tourists were important disadvantages. Taken all things into consideration, results
from this research suggest that residents in Dharavi at the moment do not recognise tourism as
voyeuristic and exploitative. They appreciate benefits and disadvantages of tourism and currently view
their tourism exchanges more positive than negative. Whether or not this remains the case, will depend
on the methods of operation of the organizations that pursue slum tourism activities.
Given the current community perception of tourism, the Reality Group is to be commended for trying to
create a triple-win situation in which tourist, community needs and company needs are met. However,
with the changing nature of slum tourism in Dharavi, and an increase in competition, recommendations
can be made to make their work more effective. Up to now the Reality Group is far from fully immersed
in community and their efforts to improve community development remain largely unknown. Residents
argue for greater involvement and transparency, confirming that ‘there is a definite need to increase the
scope of community participation in slum tourism’ (Basu, 2012, p. 78). Earlier research revealed that a
lack of consultancy with local residents, evidently leads them to become less willing to interact and
exchange with tourists (Moyle et al., 2010). .A greater focus on local education and promotion of what
RTT stands for can therefore be recommended. Unless a concerted effort is made to engage with
residents, there is a strong risk that perceived tourism drawbacks will increase.
This research was one of the first to investigate perceptions of residents towards slum tourism. As such
it has used a largely exploratory, qualitative approach. This allowed for a rich picture of the perceptions
of Dharavi residents. It would be useful to take a similar approach to slum tourism in other destinations,
both more advanced and newly emerging. Regarding the latter, unfortunately, the development of slum
tourism had to measured using a retrospective method in this research. Given the fact that slum tourism
developments are rapidly happening in different parts of the globe, it provides an excellent platform to
19
investigate residents’ perceptions in emerging destination first-hand and further develop theorising on
the matter
20
References
Al Jazeera. (2013, June 10). Slum tourism. The Stream. Al Jazeera. Retrieved from
http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201306112246-0022819
Andereck, K. L., Valentine, K. M., Knopf, R. C., & Vogt, C. A. (2005). Residents’ perceptions of community
tourism impacts. Annals of Tourism Research, 32(4), 1056–1076.
Ap, J. (1992). Residents’ perceptions on tourism impacts. Annals of Tourism Research, 19(4), 665 – 690.
Ashley, C., & Haysom, G. (2006). From Philanthropy to a different way of doing business: Strategies and
Challenges in integrating Pro-Poor approaches into tourism Business. Development Southern
Africa, 23(2), 265–280.
Basu, K. (2012). Slum tourism: for the poor, by the poor. In F. Frenzel, K. Koens, & M. Steinbrink (Eds.),
Slum Tourism: Poverty, Power and Ethics (pp. 66–82). London: Routledge.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology,
3(2), 77–101.
Beeton, S. (2006). Community Development Through Tourism. Landlinks Press.
Brida, J. G., Chiappa, G. D., Meleddu, M., & Pulina, M. (2014). A comparison of residents’ perceptions in
two cruise ports in the Mediterranean Sea. International Journal of Tourism Research, 16(2),
180–190.
Burgold, J., Frenzel, F., & Rolfes, M. (2013). Editorial: Observations on slums and their touristification.
DIE ERDE–Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin, 144(2), 99–104.
Butler, S. R. (2012). Curatorial Interventions in Township Tours: Two Trajectories. In F. Frenzel, K. Koens,
& M. Steinbrink (Eds.), Slum Tourism: Poverty, Power and Ethics. London: Routledge.
CCTV. (2014, January 4). Why do people take part in slum tourism? CCTV Insight: Cartagena, A Tale of
Two Cities. Washington, DC: CCTV America. Retrieved from http://www.cctv-
america.com/2014/04/01/cctv-insight-cartagena-a-tale-of-two-cities
21
Chhabra, D., & Chowdhury, A. (2012). Slum Tourism: Ethical or Voyeuristic. Tourism Review
International, 16(1), 69–73.
Cole, S. (1997). Anthropologists, local communities and sustainable tourist development. In M. Stabbler
(Ed.), Tourism and Sustainability: Principles to Practice (pp. 219–230). Oxford: CABI.
Coles, T., Fenclova, E., & Dinan, C. (2013). Tourism and corporate social responsibility: A critical review
and research agenda. Tourism Management Perspectives, 6, 122–141.
Deery, M., Jago, L., & Fredline, L. (2012). Rethinking social impacts of tourism research: A new research
agenda. Tourism Management, 33(1), 64–73.
Diedrich, A., & García-Buades, E. (2009). Local perceptions of tourism as indicators of destination
decline. Tourism Management, 30(4), 512–521.
Doxey, G. V. (1975). A causation theory of visitor-resident irritants: methodology and research inference.
In Travel and tourism research association’s sixth annual conference proceedings (pp. 195–198).
San Diego.
Duarte, R. (2010). Exploring the Social Impacts of Favela Tourism: An insight into the residents’ view
(MSc thesis). Wageningen University, Wageningen.
Dyson, P. (2012). Slum Tourism: Representing and Interpreting “Reality” in Dharavi, Mumbai. Tourism
Geographies, 1–21.
Freire-Medeiros, B. (2010). Favela Tourism: Listening to Local Voices. In F. Frenzel & K. Koens (Eds.),
Destination Slum!. Bristol.
Freire-Medeiros, B. (2012). Favela Tourism: Listening to Local Voices. In F. Frenzel, K. Koens, & M.
Steinbrink (Eds.), Slum Tourism: Poverty, Power and Ethics. London: Routledge.
Frenzel, F., & Koens, K. (2012). Slum Tourism: Developments in a Young Field of Interdisciplinary Tourism
Research. Tourism Geographies, 14(2), 195–212.
22
Frisch, T. (2012). Glimpses of Another World: The Favela as a Tourist Attraction. Tourism Geographies,
14(2), 320–338.
Gray, D. E. (2013). Doing research in the real world. London: SAGE.
Hanrahan, M. (2013, May 8). Slum Tourism: Shanty Town Tours In Brazil, India, South Africa Give
Travelers Glimpse At Poverty; Raise Ethical Questions. Retrieved September 5, 2014, from
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/08/slum-tourism-brazil-india-south-
africa_n_3237489.html
Harrill, R. (2004). Residents’ attitudes toward tourism development: A literature review with
implications for tourism planning. Journal of Planning Literature, 18(3), 251–266.
Koens, K., & Thomas, R. (In press). Is small beautiful? Understanding the contribution of small businesses
in township tourism to economic development. Development Southern Africa.
doi:10.1080/0376835X.2015.1010715
Lepp, A. (2008). Attitudes towards initial tourism development in a community with no prior tourism
experience: The case of Bigodi, Uganda. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 16(1), 5–22.
Mbaiwa, J. E. (2005). Enclave tourism and its socio-economic impacts in the Okavango Delta, Botswana.
Tourism Management, 26, 157–172.
McGehee, N. G., & Meares, A. C. (1998). A case study of three tourism-related craft marketing
cooperatives in Appalachia: contributions to community. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 6(1), 4–
25.
McKercher, B., & Prideaux, B. (2014). Academic myths of tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 46, 16–
28.
Meschkank, J. (2011). Investigations into slum tourism in Mumbai: poverty tourism and the tensions
between different constructions of reality. GeoJournal, 1–16.
23
Moyle, B., Glen Croy, W., & Weiler, B. (2010). Community Perceptions of Tourism: Bruny and Magnetic
Islands, Australia. Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, 15(3), 353–366.
Nunkoo, R., & Ramkissoon, H. (2010). Small island urban tourism: a residents’ perspective. Current Issues
in Tourism, 13(1), 37–60.
Nunkoo, R., Smith, S. L. J., & Ramkissoon, H. (2013). Residents’ attitudes to tourism: a longitudinal study
of 140 articles from 1984 to 2010. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 21(1), 5–25.
Obalola, M. (2008). Beyond philanthropy: corporate social responsibility in the Nigerian insurance
industry. Social Responsibility Journal, 4(4), 538–548.
Polonsky, M., Hall, J., Vieceli, J., Atay, L., Akdemir, A., & Marangoz, M. (2013). Using strategic
philanthropy to improve heritage tourist sites on the Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey: community
perceptions of changing quality of life and of the sponsoring organization. Journal of Sustainable
Tourism, 21(3), 376–395.
Ramchander, P. (2004). Towards the Responsible Management of the Socio-Cultural Impact of Township
Tourism (PhD thesis). University of Pretoria, Pretoria.
Ritchie, J., Lewis, J., Nicholls, C. M., & Ormston, R. (Eds.). (2013). Qualitative Research Practice: A Guide
for Social Science Students and Researchers (Second Edition edition.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE
Publications Ltd.
Rolfes, M. (2009). Poverty tourism: theoretical reflections and empirical findings regarding an
extraordinary form of tourism. GeoJournal.
Rolfes, M. (2010). Poverty tourism: theoretical reflections and empirical findings regarding an
extraordinary form of tourism. GeoJournal, 75(5), 421–442.
Roy, A. (2011). Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism. International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, 35(2), 223–238.
24
Sirakaya, E., Teye, V., & Sönmez, S. (2002). Understanding residents’ support for tourism development in
the central region of Ghana. Journal of Travel Research, 41(1), 57–67.
Sharpley, R. (2014). Host perceptions of tourism: A review of the research. Tourism Management, 42,
37–49.
Smith, M. D., & Krannich, R. S. (1998). Tourism dependence and resident attitudes. Annals of Tourism
Research, 25(4), 783–802.
Søderstrøm, J. A. (2014). Responsible Practice for Township Tourism. An exploration of stakeholders’
opinions, commitments, actions and expectations in the township of Langa, Cape Town.
Presented at the Destination Slum! 2: New Developments and Perspectives in Slum Tourism
Research, Potsdam.
Steinbrink, M. (2012). “We did the Slum!” – Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective. Tourism
Geographies, 14(2), 1–22.
Vanden Berg, T. M. (2014). An Inquiry Into Jamaican Perspectives on Tourism. Tourism Culture &
Communication, 14(2), 103–115.
Wang, Y. A., & Pfister, R. E. (2008). Residents’ attitudes toward tourism and perceived personal benefits
in a rural community. Journal of Travel Research.
Williams, J., & Lawson, R. (2001). Community issues and resident opinions of tourism. Annals of Tourism
Research, 28(2), 269–290.
Zhang, J., Inbakaran, R. J., & Jackson, M. S. (2006). Understanding community attitudes towards tourism
and host—Guest interaction in the urban—rural border region. Tourism Geographies, 8(2), 182–
204.
case you need to use/Steinbrink 2012 Slum Tourism.pdf
This article was downloaded by: [University of Strathclyde] On: 28 August 2014, At: 03:15 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtxg20
‘We did the Slum!’ – Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective Malte Steinbrink a a Institute for Geography & Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) , University of Osnabrück , Osnabrück , Germany Published online: 20 Feb 2012.
To cite this article: Malte Steinbrink (2012) ‘We did the Slum!’ – Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective, Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment, 14:2, 213-234, DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2012.633216
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2012.633216
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
Tourism Geographies Vol. 14, No. 2, 213–234, May 2012
‘We did the Slum!’ – Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective
MALTE STEINBRINK Institute for Geography & Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS), University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany
Abstract Slum tourism in the Global South is a relatively new phenomenon. The tourist gaze at the poverty of the Others is long established, though. This paper is concerned with the genesis of urban poverty tourism. By placing the phenomenon of slumming in the wider realm of the social upheavals in Victorian London and early twentieth century USA, the historical review first explains its dependency on the social context determining its emergence and evolution. Secondly, slum tourism is shown to be adequately understood only if seen as part of modern city tourism. Thirdly, it is demonstrate that the culturalization of poverty attains special significance in slum tourism. Fourthly, the history of slum tourism is shown to have implications for understanding present-day slum tourism in the Global South, using South Africa as an example. The article is designed to be a first step towards understanding the conditions, forms and consequences of globalization of slum tourism and the process of constructing the global slum as a universal type of tourist destination.
Key Words: South Africa, England, USA, slum tourism, poverty tourism, urban tourism, ethnic slumming, moral slumming, global slumming, history
Introduction
Tourism lives on what is different. Its economic implications alone urge it to constantly create new products and open up new segments on the market. Tourism always looks for new places, inventing sights and sites which are then marked and marketed as tourist attractions. The fact that tourism needs innovations for purposes of self- preservation is by no means new. What is interesting, however, is to take a look beyond this pure logic of market mechanisms in order to find out how, why and with what implications places of tourism are socially constructed.
The emergence of a new trend in tourism, too, always gives rise to reflection on why it emerges precisely at a particular point in time and in a particular social context. Since the 1990s, one such new trend has been observable in long-distance international tourism, a development which has been spreading rapidly on a global
Correspondence Address: Malte Steinbrink, Institute for Geography & Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, University of Osnabrück, Seminarstr. 19 a/b, 49074 Osnabrück, Germany. Fax: 0049-541-969-4333; Tel.: 0049-541-9694556; Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1461-6688 Print/1470-1340 Online /12/02/00213–22 C© 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2012.633216
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
214 M. Steinbrink
basis and which, at first sight, might look surprising; and that is ‘slum tourism’ in the Global South. In spite of strong criticism coming from the international media, visits to poor urban areas in big cities in the South are unmistakably gaining in importance both in terms of tourism and in economic terms. How can this development be explained? How and with what consequences are slums constructed as destinations worth touring during a holiday?
In an increasing number of big cities in the Global South, poor urban settlements are marketed for tourism. This slum tourism takes place primarily in the form of guided tours – be they bus, jeep or walking tours. The slum tours already constitute an important item in the range of offers made by the urban tourism industry. For example, a slum tour has now become part of the standard programme of a visit to Cape Town or Johannesburg; and a tour of Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro’s largest favela, is, today, one of the tourist’s must dos, just as strolling at the beach of Ipanema and climbing the Sugar Loaf. Estimates suggest an annual 300,000 or so tourists embarking on slum tours in Cape Town (AP 2007) and approximately 40,000 in Rio (Freire-Medeiros 2009). These figures indicate that slum tourism is already a highly professionalized business in South Africa and Brazil. But slum tours have also been meeting with increasing interest in other countries of the Global South, both among tourists and providers, who see a huge growth potential in this branch of tourism. For example, organized slum tours are executed, inter alia, in the poor areas of Manila (Philippines), Jakarta (Indonesia), Cairo (Egypt), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Nairobi (Kenya), Mazatlán (Mexico), Bangkok (Thailand) and Windhoek (Namibia).
A current example is India, where slum tourism is noticeably expanding at present. A driving force for this development has been the huge media attention in the wake of eight-times Oscar-awarded Hollywood Film Slumdog Millionaire (2009), which is acted against the backdrop of Dharavi, the largest slum in Mumbai (Hannam & Knox 2010; Meschkank 2011).
The new phenomenon of slum tourism in the Global South not only reminds us that tourism lives on what is novel and different; it suggests, at the same time, that new trends in tourism are never created out of nothing. They draw upon more or less known images and ideas about unfamiliar and distant regions and their inhabitants. They have recourse to stocks of standardized long-standing ascriptions that arise in discursive processes occurring both within and outside tourism. Tourism seeks for discursive connectivity, reproduces these ascriptions and creates new meanings, while reacting to social structures and their changes. Allegedly new forms of tourism almost always have historical forerunners with which they link semantically and from which their specific repertoire of offers develops. For example, tourism in ‘Europe’s Cultural Capitals’ or cultural sightseeing tours organized by companies like the German firm Studiosus can be traced back to the ‘Grand Tour’, the educational tours of the nobility in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries (cf. Adler 1989). Similarly, contemporary mass seaside tourism has a long history, which began from the ‘discovery of the coast’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and led, via Brighton as the archetype of the
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective 215
seaside resort, to the ‘global beach’ (Löfgren 1999) as a present-day global-universal destination type (cf. also Shields 1991).
Today’s slum tourism in the Global South has forerunners, too. This paper seeks to illustrate how ‘long-established’ modes of constructing, presenting and perceiving slums as places worth touring find their way into the current practice of poverty tourism. Hence, the reconstruction of the roughly 150-year-old tradition of this form of tourism is not only of interest with regard to the illustration of the history of the development of tourism; it can also provide valuable clues to an understanding of today’s forms and modes of constructing slums as ‘places of tourism’ (Pott 2007). If we assume that the tourist gaze (Urry 1990) at poverty is long established (at least in its essential features), then current poverty tourism as such will be less astounding than the dynamism of its global spread. An overriding goal of research on slum tourism, then, would consist in grasping the conditions, forms and consequences of its globalization. The present paper, which is primarily concerned with the genesis of poverty tourism, is designed to be a first step towards understanding the process of constructing the global slum as a global-universal type of tourist destination.
In this paper, a brief presentation of the recent phenomenon – drawing upon the example of township tourism in South Africa – will be followed by a closer look into the long-standing tradition of slum tourism. By attempting to place the phenomenon in the wider realm of the social and cultural upheavals happening in each of the periods studied, the historical review seeks, first, to explain its dependency on the social context determining its emergence and evolution. Secondly, it will become clear that slum tourism can be adequately understood only if seen as part of modern city tourism. Thirdly, the historical review will demonstrate that and how the ‘culturalization’ of poverty attains special significance in slum tourism. Fourthly, the closing remarks indicate in what respects the insights gained from the historical review can be drawn upon for enquiries into present-day slum tourism in the Global South.
Slumming in the Global South: the Example of Township Tourism in South Africa
‘Township tourism’ is South Africa’s version of the new global phenomenon of poverty tourism. It is meant to serve here as an example to start from in my analytical concern with the phenomenon.
The economic significance of international tourism for South Africa has increased considerably since the end of apartheid. The number of international arrivals in the country rose from 3.6 million in 1994 to 9.1 million in 2007 (Steinbrink & Frehe 2008). In terms of its significance for South Africa’s GNP, the tourism sector has, meanwhile, even outdone gold mining, which has for long been the backbone of that country’s national economy. It is expected that tourism’s economic importance will continue to grow even in the future, thanks to the 2010 football world cup (cf. Haferburg & Steinbrink 2010).
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
216 M. Steinbrink
Generally speaking, the tourist industry sees the country’s tourism potential in its landscape and natural beauty (national parks, impressive mountain landscapes, beaches, vineyards, etc.). However, following the end of apartheid, township tourism has been developing as a new branch of the tourism industry – a development which has little to do with the traditional sights. Township tourism is organized mainly in the form of guided bus tours which run through selected townships. The tour destinations are the urban residential areas of those population groups formerly classified as ‘non-white’, residential areas which emerged during the era of the apartheid regime and which were planned on the basis of that regime’s inhuman racist ideology. It is the poorest strata of the population that live in the townships. The majority of the ‘black’ city dwellers still live there – and, largely, still under deplorable living conditions.
Township tourism had forerunners during the apartheid era, but in its recent form it started in the early 1990s. The first township tours were conducted to Soweto (South Western Township) in Johannesburg. At the time, township tourism was a kind of niche tourism for politically interested travellers who wanted to visit Soweto as a place symbolizing oppression and the anti-apartheid struggle, their aim being to see the sites of resistance and the houses in which symbolic figures, such as Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu, used to live. It was from there that township tourism evolved rapidly, expanding over the whole of South Africa as a phenomenon of urban tourism. An ever-increasing number of international travellers – predominantly from Britain, Germany, The Netherlands and the USA – travelled through the townships and informal settlements of different historical origins and sizes during their holidays in South Africa. In the process, historical and political aspects which had initially been the focus shifted to the background (Rolfes et al. 2009).
According to official data, over 300,000 tourists participated in organized tours in Cape Town in 2006 (AP 2007). This is almost 25 percent of the total annual number of overseas international visitors. Apart from the trip to the Table Mountain, the trip to Cape Point, the visit to the Waterfront and a wine tour, township tourism is among the ‘things to tick off the list’ while visiting Cape Town. Township tourism is a booming business. More and more tour operators are pushing their way into the market. In Cape Town, roughly 50 different tour operators can be identified. Meanwhile, an increasing number of big travel agencies operating on an international or a supra-regional basis now also include township tours in their – otherwise rather conventional – range of products. Township tourism has thus developed into a phenomenon of mass tourism in South Africa (cf. Rolfes & Steinbrink 2009).
To understand the phenomenon of slum tourism, it appears useful to first discuss the question of what the slum actually ‘is’ – not from a social-scientific perspective or from the perspective of town planning, but from the viewpoint of tourism. In order to find out what tourists look for in the slums, the question as to what they expect to find there would suggest itself. (They want to see what they expect to see!) It appears plausible to assume that the attractiveness of slums as tourist destinations is
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective 217
Figure 1. Associations with the term ‘township’ (according to Rolfes & Steinbrink 2009; author’s own representation).
directly connected with the images, conceptions and associations the tourists have of the places they intend to visit; in the case of South Africa, this would mean their image of the township.
What images, then, do tourists have of the townships? This question constituted the focus of a study project conducted in Cape Town in 2007. Questions were put to 179 tourists, immediately before embarking on a township tour, on what they associated with the term ‘township’ (cf. Rolfes et al. 2009).
The results reveal that negative associations dominate the picture (see Fig- ure 1). ‘Township’ is associated with crime, squalor, drugs, poor housing conditions, apartheid, unemployment, etc. The most frequently mentioned association by far was ‘poverty’. ‘Poverty’ is in the centre of the semantic field evoked by the term ‘town- ship’. Meschkank (2011: 55) obtains very similar results in her study of tourism in Dharavi/Mumbai: ‘If you ask the tourists participating in a Dharavi tour what they expect to see, the most common answer is: poverty’. It is, therefore, appropriate to understand township tourism as a kind of poverty tourism.
Yet, ‘poverty’ does not characterize this form of tourism sufficiently. For – as in the case of many other forms of tourism – ‘spatialization’ plays a central role in endeavours that make it possible to visualize and experience poverty and, thus,
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
218 M. Steinbrink
in the construction of urban tourism as a whole. Poverty’s territorial localization makes it possible for it to be expected, planned and visited for purposes of tourism. Consequently, the tours are conducted to certain areas, to city districts categorized as townships, as favelas or, generally, as slums. It is in these areas that poverty is located; this is where poverty can be expected and experienced – the slum is the ‘place of poverty’. The term ‘slumming’ explained further below, therefore, describes this form of poverty tourism very precisely.
The results of the studies stated above are, understandably, startling, since they do contradict common notions of what tourists do during their holiday. True, gazing at poverty may indeed lead to the striven-for ‘distance away from everyday life’; yet, the wish to see ‘something else’ as expressed in the common holiday motives usually refers to something nice, beautiful and relaxing. In contrast thereto, township tourism seems to correspond to what MacCannell (1976) calls ‘negative sightseeing’: a kind of social bungee jumping in which the predominantly bourgeois thrill-seekers – driven by a lust for angst (cf. Welz 1993: 48) – seek to experience the social depth. The slum tours seem to permit tourists to fathom out the possible drop height sensuously (using their eyes, ears and noses), but without themselves actually running the risk of a hard landing (Steinbrink & Frehe 2008). But I doubt that the lust for the socio-voyeuristic thrill and the wish to experience a ‘safe danger’ or an ‘insulated adventure’ (Schmidt 1979) is sufficient to grasp this phenomenon of tourism analytically. This element of ‘controlled risk’ (Freire-Medeiros 2009) is only a very partial explanation of what motivates tourists to visit impoverished urban areas.
Here, the question immediately arises as to the origin of this tourist gaze at the poverty of Others. How has the tourist interest in the slum developed historically? What traditions of spatializing observation and interpretations exist in the collective memory of the tourists? How, then, is it conceivable that ‘places of poverty’ have become ‘places of tourism’ (Pott 2007)?
A Review of the History of Slumming
The concept of ‘slumming’ has described a particular social practice for one and a half centuries; in this practice, members of wealthy population groups visit residential areas of poor urban groups in their leisure time. The origins of this practice lie in the metropolises of the North, especially in Britain and the USA, where modern (urban) tourism also evolved.
The ‘slum’ has always symbolized the ‘dark’, the ‘low’, the ‘unknown’ side of the city; it has always been a projection surface. From the bourgeois perspective, the poor urban areas have constantly been constructed as areas containing ‘the Other’. Accordingly, visiting a slum for leisure purposes has always been done in the wish to experience the Other. However, what was identified as being ‘the Other’ varied from one historical period to another and depended on the respective social context in which it existed.
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective 219
Victorian London: The Cradle of Slumming
The practice of slumming has its roots in nineteenth-century London. It was from there that the phenomenon started, and it did so, as will be seen later, in a very Victorian-Anglican manner.
London – at the time, the politically and economically most powerful city in the world and capital of the world-encompassing British Empire – developed into a de- mographic colossus in the nineteenth century. Its population grew from one million to six million within one hundred years. Its urbanization rates, which were due primarily to rural exodus and immigrations from Ireland, were just as enormous as was the gap between the rich and the poor. In the course of urbanization and industrialization, the social classes were separated geographically in a typically European east–west divide. The blatant urban segregation pattern appeared like the spatial configuration of the deeply split social order of the time.
Originally ‘slum’ was a slang expression which referred to individual lodgings, then to backyards (‘back slums’) and later to whole urban quarters (Mayne 1993). The etymological origin of the word is controversial. The Oxford Dictionary of Etymology describes it as a word of unknown origin, but presumes a ‘gypsy’ origin (Hoad 1996). Cassidy (2007), however, presupposes an Irish origin (s’lom [pron. s’lum], the Irish meaning being ‘is bare, is naked, is poor’). Davis (2007: 26) refers to the Vocabulary of the Flash Language by Vaux (1912), according to which slum means something like ‘swindle’ or ‘criminal machinations’ (translations based on German version (2007) of Planet of Slums (2006)). According to Dyos et al. (1982), it was Cardinal Wiseman who turned the term ‘slum’ into a term of the standard language from around 1820 onwards. Dyos et al. (1982) point out that Wiseman was often quoted in British newspapers in that time, slowly leading to the wider popular use of the term ‘slum’ for a more general description of destitute urban housing conditions (ibid). Since the mid of the 19th century, certain poor settlements in the USA, France and India were also labelled as slums (Davis 2007: 26).
London’s rapid growth resulted in the fact that its inhabitants no longer knew every part of their city from personal experience. An ‘imaginative geography’ of the city thus emerged in parallel with the clear spatial separation between the rich and the poor. From the viewpoint of the top of the vertical hierarchy of London’s social structure, the slums of the East End represented the dark ‘abyss’. One needs only to take a glance at Peter Keating’s collection of social reports (Keating 1976) from that time to notice how often the word ‘abyss’ occurs in the titles alone. The slum, according to this observation, labels the place of the physical, social, economic and moral abyss and of the threatening fall into the bottomless pit.
In the perception of London’s middle and upper classes, the East End slums were ‘places of the unknown Other’. The existence of these places alone was a cause for concern and fear in society. The fears, however, were not only about sanitary and hygienic conditions and the threat of epidemics (in particular, cholera). Rather, there
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
220 M. Steinbrink
were also social worries about the decline of civilization and the loss of public control. This gave rise to an image of the East End as another world – chaotic, uncivilized and horrifying. In other words, the slum represented the materialized anti-thesis to the bourgeois order of the Victorian era (Frank 2003: 53).
The nineteenth century was the period of colonial voyages of discovery, and the deletion of white spots on the world map was a British passion at that time. In Victorian London, the East End was often referred to as the ‘dark continent’ (cf. Frank 2003: 54f.; Lindner 2004) – the same designation used for Africa.
As there is a darkest Africa, is there not also a darkest England? . . . May we not find a parallel at our doors and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces places of similar horrors to those which Stanley has found in the Equatorial forest? (Booth 1890: 11–12).
By analogy with the colonial voyage of discovery, the explorer’s spirit, too, awoke in the city, the aim of which was to discover ‘the distant’ in ‘the near-by’ (‘at our doors’, ‘within a stone’s throw’). There was an awakening of interest in social expeditions into the abysmal depths of the urban terra incognita.
The first people to go on these ‘social expeditions’ were clergymen, such as William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, journalists and social reformers. In their reports, they tended to present themselves as explorers who ventured, dead-tired, into the bottomless social swamp. Their reports established a new literary genre – the exploratory social reportage. In their writings, the social reporters decisively influenced and shaped the discourse on the East End, and the prevailing image of its inhabitants.
To the wealthy of London, the slums were, on the one hand, a threatening strange world. On the other hand, however, the slums promised adventures and formed the projection space for the wildest of fantasies. Frequently wrapped in the cloak of concern, welfare and charity, more and more private benefactors in the middle of the century were setting off for the ‘undiscovered land of the poor’. Early forms of slum tours were already encountered here. At the time, the discovery tours to London’s East End were guided by police officers in civilian attire, journalists and clergy (Figure 2).
These upper-class visits in the East End were called ‘slumming’ as early as around 1850 (cf. Koven 2006). The term ‘slumming’ is, therefore, almost as old as the term ‘slum’ itself. Koven (2006: 6–10) notes that from the outset, the term slumming was mostly used with a scornful to explicitly derogatory connotation by members of the upper class, who, for their part, did not indulge in this practice. ‘Slumming, the word and the activity associated with it, was distinguished historically by a persistent pattern of disavowal. It was a pejorative term . . . ’ (Koven 2006: 8). The curiosity about the slum that finds expression in the slumming activity did indeed evoke suspicion from the very beginning, particularly in regard to the motivation of the so-called slummers (i.e. those who practised slumming). Behind the lofty intentions
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective 221
Figure 2. Slum tour in Victorian London. Source: Koven (2006: 15).
transmitted outwardly, other, less noble, motives were suspected, motives of which the slummers should obviously have been ashamed.
This suggests that more was associated with the slum – the place of the ‘unknown Other’ – than just the difference in economic terms. There was more to slums than their characterization as places of poverty. For there were also association chains linked to ‘poverty’ which stretched into fields that lay outside the economic sphere. It can be shown that ‘slum’ and ‘poverty’ have experienced a semantic coupling resulting from the talk about the ‘omnipresence of filth and dirt’ (cf. Lindner 2004: 20). An indication of how closely ‘slum’ and ‘dirt’ are connotatively connected is given by the observation that at the turn of the century, the term ‘slum’ was often rendered in German as Schlammviertel (‘mud quarter’) (cf. Spiller 2008 [1911]).
The words ‘filth’ and ‘dirt’ lie at the point where two chains of association deriving from slum and poverty intersect (Figure 3). Both chains of association lead directly into corporeality – in particular, into the lower zones of the body: through cholera, a serious form of diarrhoea, into the anus, and through lust, into the genitals. The Victorian era was a period in which corporeality was denied and concealed in the bourgeois milieu. It thus becomes clear that ‘dirt’ indeed is by no means only a
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
222 M. Steinbrink
Figure 3. Poverty, slum and dirt as a close semantic association. Source: author’s representation.
hygienic category and that it has always been a moral category, too, which refers to something indecent and repugnant.
In the middle- and upper-class discourse over the slum, an almost direct equation of the poor sanitary conditions with a state of moral decay took place. Through the close semantic relation between ‘poverty’, ‘dirt’ and ‘sin’, the poverty concept also became subjected to moralizing and, through the assignment of poverty to certain areas, a connection was finally established between urban topography and morality, which was tantamount to the construction of a moral topography of the city.
The slums apparently strongly provoked the dirty fantasies of London’s bour- geoisie, its ‘belief’ in moral standards notwithstanding. From the middle-class point of view, poverty and slums have stood not only for misery and disease, but also for eroticism, licentiousness and sexual savagery. Little wonder, then, that the slums, in the eyes of London’s society, which was shaped by rigid moral expectations and inflexible social rules, were areas of both gloomy threat and erotic curiosity: slums were places of moral decay and places of libidinal liberty (cf. Lindner 2004: 19ff.).
This explains indeed why the non-slummers often imputed filthy motives to the slummers. And it also explains why the professional or altruist slummers (the clergy, social reformers, benefactors, etc.) made repeated attempts to distinguish themselves from the casual or leisure slummers to avoid being thrown into the same ‘pot of mud’, in view of their noble motives (cf. also Koven 2006).
In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, slumming increasingly developed into a more ‘purpose-free’ leisure-time activity of London’s higher classes.
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective 223
Figure 4. ‘Slumming in this Town’. Source: New York Times (14 September 1884).
Amusement shifted into the centre of things and the ‘lust for vice’, as well as interest in the ‘immoral Other’, became more clearly visible. The new phenomenon had hardly gained contours as a leisure-time entertainment, when its globalization began. Slumming was now making its way ‘across the pond’.
‘Let’s Go Slumming in the USA’
In the USA, the phenomenon of slumming emerged for the first time in New York in the 1880s. Figure 4 shows a cutting from an 1884 issue of the New York Times. The journalist who wrote this newspaper article described slumming as “the [latest] rage”, as a London peculiarity and new fashion (“a fashionable London Mania”; “the latest fashionable idiosyncrasy in London”) imported to New York by well-to- do tourists from England. Additionally, he prophesied that this extravagant fashion would develop into a hype amongst the New Yorkers– and he was later proven right.
The idea of slumming fell on fertile ground in the USA. However, its social breeding ground in the USA differed from that in Victorian England. The phenomenon, there- fore, did develop differently in America. Following the first appearance of slumming in the ‘New World’, a process of change was evolving which was very interesting in regard to the genesis of poverty tourism as a whole. In the social context of the
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
224 M. Steinbrink
USA in the early twentieth century, the element of moral difference remained char- acteristic of slumming (Dowling 2007; Heap 2009) but, successively, other markers of difference became more dominant in the construction of the slum as the ‘place of the Other’. This change in the construction of ‘the Other’ localized in the slum will be the subject of our further discussion.
Touristification of slumming – urban heterogeneity as a tourist attraction. Although slumming in London already comprised certain elements of tourism – e.g. Koven (2006) indicates that Victorian Travel Guidebooks recommended visits to charitable institutions in the East End – it was in New York that one could actually speak of the ‘touristification’ of slumming.
The occurrence of slumming in the USA was directly linked with the development of international (urban) tourism. As indicated in the above-quoted New York Times article (see Figure 4), it was the tourists from England who carried the idea of slumming in their mental luggage. And now, the ladies and gentlemen from London wanted to visit the poorer areas in New York (e.g. Bowery, Five Points), too, during their sightseeing tours. Here, then, for the first time, the element of a regionalizing (cultural) comparison, which is typical of (urban) tourism, appears on the scene. Urban tourism is fundamentally based on the spatial differentiation between here and there. For the fact that cities become places worth touring is based on a spatially indicated expectation of difference (cf. Pott 2007: 113). Consequently, the first slum tourists from London compared ‘their’ London East End with the Lower East Side in Manhattan:
A quite well-known young English Noble, returning from a tour of the east side the other night with some friends, observed over his brandy and soda: ‘Ah, this is a great city, but you have no slums like we have. I have been in rickety condemned buildings that it was absolutely dangerous to go through! Found six families living in one miserably ventilated cellar – 24 persons, 10 of them adults, living in one room. No such slums here!’ (New York Times, 14 September 1884).
It was through the practice of slumming that poor urban areas first became tourist sights which were then drawn upon for comparisons between the tourist’s own city with the one visited. In other words: it was in New York that the tourist’s comparative gaze, in search of the differences between ‘own city’ and the destination, first designed the slum as an urban tourist attraction.
Slumming in the USA developed in such a way that the slummers could give in to their tourist curiosity without being ashamed of doing so. Entertainment intentions were professed more openly; the tourists were now in a position to cast off the moral cover without having any qualms. Compared to slumming in London, slumming in New York at the end of the nineteenth century was no longer about social reformist
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective 225
matters; it was rather about showcasing and experiencing slums as interesting tourist sights.
For the first time, too, even the guidebooks at the time recommended routes for walking tours in the cities, which passed through various working-class areas (cf. Keeler 1902; Ingersoll 1906). Shortly before the turn of the century, the first tour companies were established in Manhattan, Chicago and San Francisco; these companies specialized in guided slum visits, both reproducing and altering the slum semantics that had emerged in London. Due to the commercialization of slum tours, slumming became open to a broader range of customers. More and more city tourists from other parts of the USA were now participating in slum tours. Slumming had become an integral part of urban tourism (Cocks 2001: 174ff.).
The strong interest taken in slumming in the cities of the USA was closely linked with the image of the cosmopolitan metropolis simultaneously evolving in that era. This image comprised the notion of an internal heterogeneity of the city, of the inner- urban juxtaposition of the unequal, the co-existence of backwardness and modernity, and of wealth and poverty. America’s cities quite symbolically exemplified the con- cept of the cosmopolitan city. Urban tourism took up this idea, and in its modes of representation, it reproduced the discursive connection between largeness, density, strangeness, heterogeneity and urban cosmopolitanism: city tourism marketing and image campaigns pursued the aim of presenting the internal differences within the cities in order to highlight the cosmopolitan character of the urban destinations. In the process, the thematized differences were spatially assigned to different parts of the city. The commercial slum visits, too, were explicitly referred to particular city quarters, thus emphasizing the schema of spatial classification. Another reason, there- fore, why the slums were also seen as ‘sights worth visiting’ was that they were conceived of as an expression of the city’s internal heterogeneity, of the wealth of contrasts of city life, and of its cosmopolitan diversity. In this way, the slums and slum tours contributed towards making the city as a whole an attractive tourist destination.
‘Culture’ is the dominant mode of observation in urban tourism and, indeed, a defining feature of urban tourism as a specific form of tourism in its own merit (as opposed to seaside tourism, hiking and many other forms of tourism) (cf. Pott 2007: 109ff.). Since slumming became an integral element of modern urban tourism in America, the two comparative perspectives discussed – the heterogenizing perspec- tive, which emphasizes the internal diversity of the city (this one here vs. that one there), and the comparative perspective (tourist’s own town vs. town visited) – can be understood as variants of the tourists’ cultural observation schema. And, indeed, culture is explicitly referred to precisely when the heterogenizing schema which fo- cuses on inner-urban spatial differences is being applied in the context of slumming. The next section will examine this aspect more closely.
Ethnicization of slumming – the immigrant quarter as a tourist attraction. The representation of America’s metropolitan tourist destinations emphasized the spa- tial juxtaposition of different cultures within the city. The special focus was on
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
226 M. Steinbrink
ethno-cultural differences. This discursive framework did also structure the slum- ming phenomenon in urban tourism (cf. Conforti 1996; Dowling 2007; Heap 2009). Thus, it was in the American version of slumming that ‘ethnicity’ became a dominant category. The slumming tours, which had evolved in different cities all over the States after the turn of the century, predominantly went to the urban enclaves of the new immigrant groups from Eastern and Southern Europe, and from Asia. This led to the development of a phenomenon that Cocks (2001) calls ‘ethnic slumming’. The destination slum was now constructed as a ‘place of the ethno-cultural Other’.
It is revealing to look at this ethnicization of slumming against the social back- ground at the time of its emergence. Ethnic slumming evolved in a period in which the significance of ‘racial’ and ‘national’ categories was undergoing rapid and fun- damental changes in the political system of the USA. Between 1880 and 1920, there were millions of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and from Asia en- tering the USA. This brought about feelings of disquiet among the so-called White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). Many felt threatened by this wave of immigra- tion, and they assumed that the non-Protestant groups (Catholics, Jews and adherents of Asian religions) were less capable of being integrated in American society than were the old immigrant groups from Northern and Western Europe.
It was at that time that public approval of the idea of ‘racial equality’ was undergo- ing a noticeable decline. In particular, the former slaves and their descendants were excluded from participation in political life; in the Southern States, legislation was adopted ensuring their residential segregation and the deprivation of their rights and, in the rest of the country, this was wrongfully practised as well (Cocks 2001: 187). On the whole, nationality and racial classifications were relevant categories with regard to access to jobs and housing. Racism and xenophobia shaped many sectors of society, including urban development (Cocks 2001). This led to the emergence of the well-known immigrant colonies (e.g. Little Italy, Chinatown, Judea and Russian Quarter) in the big cities of the USA, quarters that were often characterized by poor urban housing conditions and economic poverty.
For tourism, on the other hand, these places became exotic, colourful attractions (cf. Conforti 1996). The segregated quarters were presented as picturesque and aes- thetically complementary to the modern parts of the city. Perceiving them as a natural part of the modern metropolis brought about some relief from the everyday discourse over immigrants and their unsettling otherness.
The then prevailing concept of culture, which was also relevant to tourism, con- stituted a combination of modernist-evolutionist and racist thinking. The notion of ‘race’ comprised both biological and (unalterable) cultural particularities. According to this notion, the respective ‘races’ and their ‘natural modes of life’ represent hierar- chical stages in the process of human evolution. White Americans as well as Northern and Western Europeans, the notion suggests, are at the very top of the evolutionary ladder, followed by Eastern and Southern Europeans, Asians, ‘American Indians’ and – at the very bottom of the ladder – the Blacks. Culture and cultural forms of
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective 227
expression – from literature to handicraft and music, and to lifestyle, world view and ways of social interaction – were interpreted as expressions of race and/or national origin. This notion permitted the tourists to see the living and working conditions of the different immigrant groups as expressions of a ‘cultural identity’. To them, the immigrant-quarters dwellers functioned as bearers of their respective cultures. What- ever they did was interpreted as a cultural expression of their ‘unalterable nature’ (cf. Cocks 2001).
The tourist representation of the different immigrant quarters – take the exam- ple of San Francisco’s Chinatown – focused on the ‘cultural identities’ of the in- habitants and accentuated their cultural otherness. The representations in tourism largely fell back on stereotypes and homogenizing ascriptions in order to meet the tourists’ expectations as regards observable differences and thus to fulfil their quest for authenticity.
The ethnic categorization and essentialization of social reality in the context of urban tourism contributed to the legitimization of the social and economic dispari- ties. Observed within the cultural schema, the immigrant groups were symbolically assigned to their place – both spatially (i.e. within ‘their’ quarters) and socially (i.e. at the margins of society). Along with the presentation and interpretation of observ- able differences as cultural (and quasi-natural) differences, the social inequalities were deproblematized. The slum was no longer regarded as a manifestation of socio- structural conditions of inequality, but as an expression of the cultural configuration of a modern American metropolis.
It follows that the display of the American city for purposes of urban tourism by no means presented it as a materialized symbol of the assimilation of various immigrant groups in American society. On the contrary, what it presented was a relatively unconnected form of coexistence. The ideology of the social melting pot had become fragile anyway. With the presentation of immigrant quarters as picturesque elements of a loose conglomerate of single cultural spaces, slumming fulfilled a relieving function: it masked the problem-related assimilation discourse which was omnipresent in bourgeois political discussions and in the media – in favour of the observation of the colourful, exotic places of the ‘ethnic Other’ (Figure 5).
Apart from international tourists, it was the bourgeois WASPs who visited the immigrant quarters. The WASPs regarded America as the most modern of all countries and the American people as culturally superior. To them, the inhabitants and cultures of the slums were in contradistinction to their own culture. They considered the slum dwellers and their cultures backward, irrational and paralysing to progress. Modern Americans, the WASPs believed, did not adhere to superstition, but practised science, and their culture was characterized not by tradition and stagnation, but by rationality and progress.
Yet, at the turn of the century, modernity and progress were certainly viewed critically, too. The pace at which the built environment was changing gave rise to feelings of insecurity among many Americans, just as the change in values and the
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
228 M. Steinbrink
Figure 5. Colourful postcard: Chinatown, San Francisco. Source: Curt Teich Company c. 1930 (www.flickr.com/photos/28061667@N08/4313630505/; accessed 3 May 2010).
crumbling of old certainties did. The pressure of progress and of having to advance at all costs was also experienced as a burden. This led to the emergence of new emotional longings within America’s middle class, for example the yearning for a pre-modern world, for warmth, deceleration and communal togetherness (cf. Conforti 1996). The slum visits served this purpose. The immigrant quarters were turned into sights on which these nostalgic yearnings could focus. The quarters symbolized a ‘way of life’ which seemed to be more strongly filled with social meaning than the modern everyday life of the tourist in a cold and sterile American society determined by market rationalism and individualism. The slumming tours thus helped to give the living conditions in the segregated city districts an idyllic character. Hence, they intensified the trend towards romanticizing urban poverty (cf. Cocks 2001).
The destination slum produced by the early form of urban tourism in Europe and North America was thus adapted, on the one hand, to the image of the modern, heterogeneous city. However, with its romantic connotations, it also served, at the same time, as a place of desire for tourists, permitting them to experience a pre- modern world of a bygone era. The culturalization of the slum, with the described homogenization, essentialization and idyllicization of social conditions, looked like a legitimization of the social and economic disparities within American society. Ethnic slumming, therefore, does not mean the reduction of social distance; in effect, it always means its creation and reaffirmation.
Conclusion: Global Slumming, the Global Slum and Othering in Tourism
The review illustrates that my initial observation of a new practice of tourism in Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai is only correct to a limited extent. There is no doubt that poverty tourism has been spreading with a remarkable dynamism in many countries of the Global South since the 1990s. Yet, this phenomenon only represents the most recent stage in the 150-year-old history of tourist slumming.
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective 229
The present globalization of this form of tourism, which for long was confined to the big cities of the North, can be understood as a change in, and as a further stage of development of, slum tourism on a global scale. A continuation of slum tourism is ensured by the fact that essential elements of its earlier forms are incorporated into its current practice (see Table 1). Visiting and experiencing poverty, which is territorially assigned to certain city areas (‘slums’), has remained the goal of slum tourism. This kind of spatialization serves to concretize and visualize poverty. The examples from London and the USA demonstrate that the slum was always construed and experienced as ‘the other side of the city’ and as the ‘place of the Other’; at the same time, they illustrate that this ‘Other’ had always been a lot more than just the ‘economic Other’. Therefore, the culturalization of poverty is essential to slum tourism. While in the townships of today’s South Africa the tourist gaze is focused on ‘African culture’, seeking to find a culture of locals (or a culture of locality) orientated to a sense of community and attachment to locality, in Victorian London, poverty was addressed moralizingly in the discursive context of a culture of licentiousness. And in the USA of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is culturalization that was practised as ethnicization in the slum tours.
In spite of the continuity one may observe, the reconstruction of the genesis of slum tourism also clearly reveals changes in the phenomenon. What is regarded as ‘the Other worth visiting’ and how the cultural mode of observation assumes concrete shape varies from social context to social context. The coding of the cultural schema with its dominant distinction between ‘the moral’ and ‘the immoral’, which was very relevant in the case of London, changed when slumming was touristified in the American context. Moral aspects still played an important role in American Slumming (Dowling 2007; Heap 2009), but the focus of the culturalizing tourist gaze shifted towards the immigrant cultures, which the tourists (most of them WASPs) observed as pre-modern in a bid to distinguish them from their own culture. The destination ‘slum’ was presented as the ‘place of the ethnic pre-modern Other’. One still comes across both codings of the cultural schema (moral/immoral and modern/ethnically pre-modern) in present-day slum tourism in the Global South (see Rolfes & Steinbrink 2009; Rolfes 2010; Meschkank 2011). Both codings (and there may be more) have entered the semantics of recent slumming. Today, however, there seemingly is a new dominant coding: the distinction between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ (see Figure 5).
In a summarizing comparison, we could, therefore, contrast Moral Slumming in London’s East End of the nineteenth century and Ethnic Slumming in the USA of the early twentieth century on the one hand, with today’s form of slumming on the other. In the further development of slum tourism in times of a world-encompassing long-distance mass tourism, it is not only a global extension of the phenomenon that is taking place. The distinctions made between North (origin of the tourists) and South (slums as the destinations of the tourists) are also gaining considerably in importance. This includes the distinctions between the global (‘global village’)
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
230 M. Steinbrink
T ab
le 1.
T he
es se
nt ia
l el
em en
ts of
sl um
to ur
is m
th ro
ug h
th e
ag es
P er
io ds
an d
pl ac
es of
sl um
m in
g
C hi
na T
ow n,
L it
tl e
It al
y T
ow ns
hi p,
fa ve
la ,s
lu m
E as
t E
nd (L
on do
n: (N
Y C
,S an
F ra
nc is
co :
(J oh
an ne
sb ur
g, R
io ,M
um ba
i; ni
ne te
en th
ce nt
ur y)
ea rl
y tw
en ti
et h
ce nt
ur y)
ea rl
y tw
en ty
-fi rs
t ce
nt ur
y)
S oc
ia l
co nt
ex ts
of em
er ge
nc e
S oc
ie ty
(a s
a w
ho le
) In
du st
ri al
iz at
io n,
cl as
s so
ci et
y, co
lo ni
za ti
on /B
ri ti
sh E
m pi
re ,
de ni
al of
co rp
or ea
li ty
/p ru
de ry
M ig
ra ti
on /‘
N ew
W or
ld ’,
m od
er ni
za ti
on ,F
or di
sm G
lo ba
li za
ti on
,w or
ld so
ci et
y, po
st -c
ol on
ia li
sm
N at
io n/
re gi
on S
ee ab
ov e,
ur ba
ni za
ti on
, ru
ra l–
ur ba
n m
ig ra
ti on
,s oc
ia l
re fo
rm s/
w el
fa re
M od
er n
A m
er ic
a, na
ti on
al id
en ti
ty /n
at io
na l
hi st
or y,
m el
ti ng
po t/
as si
m il
at io
n, di
sc ri
m in
at io
n/ ra
ci sm
e. g.
in S
ou th
A fr
ic a:
po st
-a pa
rt he
id ,t
ra ns
fo rm
at io
n
C it
y U
rb an
gr ow
th ,s
eg re
ga ti
on /s
lu m
de ve
lo pm
en t,
ep id
em ic
s/ ch
ol er
a, sa
ni ta
ti on
In te
rn al
m ig
ra ti
on an
d se
gr eg
at io
n of
A fr
ic an
A m
er ic
an s,
ur ba
n m
ig ra
nt co
lo ni
es
G lo
ba l
co m
pe ti
ti on
of ci
ti es
, pe
rs is
te nc
e of
et hn
o- ec
on om
ic se
gr eg
at io
n pa
tt er
ns ,u
rb an
gr ow
th ,i
nf or
m al
it y
T ou
ri sm
U rb
an to
ur is
m (‘
so ci
al /e
ro ti
c vo
ya ge
of ur
ba n
di sc
ov er
y’ )
U rb
an to
ur is
m as
a m
as s
ph en
om en
on In
te rn
at io
na l
to ur
is m
in de
ve lo
pi ng
co un
tr ie
s as
a m
as s
ph en
om en
on ,u
rb an
to ur
is m
in de
ve lo
pi ng
co un
tr ie
s, ur
ba n
de st
in at
io n
m an
ag em
en t
M od
e an
d m
ed iu
m of
to ur
is t
co ns
tr uc
ti on
C ul
tu ra
li za
ti on
of po
ve rt
y C
ul tu
re of
‘l ic
en ti
ou sn
es s’
Im m
ig ra
nt cu
lt ur
es –
A fr
ic an
/B ra
zi li
an /I
nd ia
n cu
lt ur
e –
(‘ au
th en
ti c’
) cu
lt ur
e of
lo ca
li ty
D om
in an
t co
di ng
of th
e cu
lt ur
al sc
he m
a
m or
al /i
m m
or al
m od
er n/
pr em
od er
n gl
ob al
/l oc
al
S pa
ti al
iz at
io n
of po
ve rt
y (s
lu m
as ..
.)
P la
ce of
th e
im m
or al
O th
er P
la ce
of th
e pr
e- m
od er
n O
th er
– L
oc al
pl ac
e in
th e
gl ob
al iz
ed w
or ld
– P
la ce
of (c
ul tu
ra l)
di st
an ce
in th
e ‘g
lo ba
l vi
ll ag
e’ Ty
p e
M o ra
l sl
u m
m in
g E
th n ic
sl u m
m in
g G
lo b a l
sl u m
m in
g
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective 231
and the local (slums as places of cultural distance in the global village), as well as between the globalized tourist from the North and the local slum dweller in the South. Does the ‘destination slum’ represent a yearning for locality in a globalizing world? Is the ‘destination slum’ a place to visit in order to experience the world’s cultural diversity threatened by the homogenizing forces of globalization (‘McDonaldiza- tion’) and global tourism (‘Disneyfication’)? In that sense it appears appropriate to speak of Global Slumming in today’s context. Current examples of slum tourism in Africa (Rolfes & Steinbrink 2009; Rolfes 2010), Asia (Meschkank 2011) and Latin America (Freire-Medeiros 2009) and their representation in commercials and we- blogs give evidence. They can be interpreted as indications of the process that the new global/local observation schema, together with the historical semantic elements of slum constructions, are developing world-wide into a universal destination type – the Global Slum.
‘Global slumming’ and ‘global slum’ are still fairly imprecise terms. However, the future analysis of the processes and constructions they denote can, indeed, build on the reconstruction of the genesis of slum tourism. In addition to the results already summarized, the review also draws attention to the fact that slum tourism, from its appearance in New York onwards, can be interpreted as an integral element of modern urban tourism. Furthermore, the accounts on slumming in London and New York show that the construction of ‘the Other’ has always been based, and continues to be based, on stereotyping. The tourism-specific localization of the Other in the slum (re-)produces a homogenizing and essentializing perspective. The tendency towards the deproblematization and depoliticization of social inequalities arising from the culturalist gaze practised and exercised in early forms of slum tourism is still observable in recent forms. Moreover, I have repeatedly called attention to the dependence of the forms of slum tourism and modes of observation on social contexts. For the analysis of current township tourism in South Africa, for example, this would mean examining the forms of tourism against the background of a functionally differentiated globalized world society, of social transformations taking place in South Africa in the post-apartheid era, of the competition of cities in the global marketplace, etc. (see Table 1).
There is a further finding that seems important in connection with the necessary social contextualization of the analysis of tourism, since it reveals some promising potential as a frame of reference. I will look into it very briefly here. The reconstruction of slum tourism documented in this article not only illustrates the variability of the slum tourist construction of ‘the Other’ and/or of the ‘place of the Other’; it equally reminds us that this – like any other construction of the Other – refers to the identity of the tourists themselves and the process of its construction (as the other side of ‘the Other’). In this sense, slumming can be interpreted as a part of a self- constituting ‘Othering’ (Reuter 2002). The destination slum, which emerges through the spatialization of the self-constituting Other at the ‘other place’ (the place of ‘the Other’), functions as a medium of Othering and thus as a medium of the construction
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
232 M. Steinbrink
of the tourist’s own identity. Regardless of whether ‘the Other’ localized in the slum is repudiatingly (e.g. as ‘the frightening Other’) or positively connoted (e.g. as ‘the exotic, attractive Other’), the slum remains a medium of self-reflexive Othering. The slum functions as a symbol turned space, as ‘the foreign’ to which ‘the tourist’s ‘own’ is related, be that by comparing or by contrasting – no matter whether ‘the Other’ is seen as cold and threatening or warm and romantic. The demarcation line remains untouched, as it is a precondition for the tourist’s experience of identity.
If we consider current slum tourism against the background of globalization, and if we relate it to the contemporary horizon of a world society, then it would make sense to study the recent slumming phenomenon as part of a global Othering process. For, in contrast to its historical forerunners, slumming in the Global South is evidently no longer merely about ‘the other side of the city’ or about intra-societal heterogeneity, but, additionally – and perhaps essentially – about the ‘other side of the world’. This brings the self-constituting process of constructing a ‘world-societal Other’ to the foreground.
A postcolonial perspective, therefore, suggests itself for the in-depth analysis of contemporary slum tourism in the south. The cultural theory of Postcolonial Studies offers different valuable approaches to a critical look into the origin and effects of representations of ‘the Cultural’, ‘the Other’ and ‘the Foreign’, or of ‘the Culturally Hybrid’ which emerges through cultural contact. Although postcolonial theories have successfully proven their analytical usefulness in various disciplines, international tourism research has made relatively little use of them so far. This is astonishing, given the fact that tourism from ‘the West’ has been (re-)producing considerably powerful representations of ‘the Rest’ (cf. Hall 1992). Thus, as regards future research on slumming, the question is now spotlighted of whether, in what respects and with what consequences slum tourism in the Global South is embedded in postcolonial discourses.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Dr. Andreas Pott (University of Osnabrück) for his very important contributions and for the most valuable com- ments on an earlier version of this paper. And I would like to thank Michael Ayamba Asu for his help with translations and editing.
References
Adler, J. (1989) Origins of sightseeing, Annals of Tourism Research, 16, pp. 7–29. AP (2007) Township Tourism booming as visitors want to see “real” South Africa, USA
Today, January 9. Available at http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2007-01-04-south- africa-township-tourism_x.htm (accessed 10 June 2010).
Booth, W. (2008[1890]) In Darkest England and the Way Out (Charleston: Bibliobazaar).
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective 233
Cassidy, D. (2007) How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads (Edinburgh: AK Press).
Cocks, C. (2001) Doing the Town. The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Conforti, J. M. (1996) Ghettos as tourism attraction, Annals of Tourism Research, 23, p. 842. Davis, M. (2007) Planet der Slums (Berlin: Assoziation A.) Dowling, R. M. (2007) Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem (Illinois: First
Illinois Paperbacks). Dyos, H. J., Cannadine, D. & Reeder, D. (1982) Exploring the Urban Past: Essays in Urban History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Frank, S. (2003) Stadtplanung im Geschlechterkampf. Stadt und Geschlecht in der Großstadtentwicklung
des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Opladen: Leske&Budrich). Freire-Medeiros, B. (2009) The favela and its touristic transits, Geoforum, 40(4), pp. 580–588. Haferburg, C. & Steinbrink, M. (Eds) (2010) Mega-Event und Stadtentwicklung im globalen Süden. Die
Fußballweltmeisterschaft 2010 und ihre Impulse für Südafrika (Frankfurt a. M.: Brandes & Apsel). Hall, S. (1992) The West and the rest: Discourse and power, in: S. Hall & B. Gieben (Eds) Formations of
Modernity, pp. 275–320 (Cambridge: Polity Press). Hannam, K. & Knox, D. (2010) Understanding Tourism (London: Sage). Heap, C. (2009) Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press). Hoad, T. F. (1996) ‘Slum’, in: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Encyclopedia.com.
Available at http://www.encyclopedia.com (accessed 10 February 2009). Ingersoll, E. (1906) Handy Guide to New York City (Chicago: Rand, McNally). Keating, P. J. (1976) Into Unknown England, 1866–1913: Selections From the Social Explorers (Manch-
ester: Manchester University Press). Keeler, C. (1902) San Francisco and Thereabout (Kessinger Publishing). Koven, S. (2006) Slumming. Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press). Lindner, R. (2004) Walks on the Wild Side. Eine Geschichte der Stadtforschung (Frankfurt: Campus). Löfgren, O. (1999) On Holiday. A History of Vacationing (Berkeley: University of California Press). MacCannell, D. (1976) The Tourist. A Theory of Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books). Mayne, A. (1993) The Imagined Slum. Newspaper Representation in Three Cities (Leicester: Leicester
University Press). Meschkank, J. (2011) Investigations into slum tourism in Mumbai: Poverty tourism and the tensions
between different constructions of reality, GeoJournal, 76, pp. 47–62. Pott, A. (2007) Orte des Tourismus. Eine raum- und gesellschaftstheoretische Untersuchung (Bielefeld:
Transcript). Reuter, J. (2002) Ordnungen des Anderen. Zum Problem des Eigenen in der Soziologie des Fremden
(Bielefeld: Transcript). Rolfes, M. (2010) Poverty tourism: Theoretical reflections and empirical findings on an extraordinary form
of tourism, GeoJournal, 75(5), pp. 421–442. Rolfes, M. & Steinbrink, M. (2009) Raumbilder und Raumkonstruktionen im Township-Tourismus.
Studierende erforschen Townshiptouren in Kapstadt/Südafrika, in: M. Dickel & G. Glasze (Eds) Vielperspektivität und Teilnehmerzentrierung – Richtungsweiser der Exkursionsdidaktik, pp. 123–140 (Berlin: LIT Verlag).
Rolfes, M., Steinbrink, M. & Uhl, C. (2009) Townships as Attraction. A Case Study on Township Tourism in Cape Town (Potsdam: Universitätsverlag).
Schmidt, C. (1979) The Guided Tour: Insulated adventure, Urban Life, 7(4), pp. 441–467. Shields, R. (1991) Places on the Margin. Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge).
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14
234 M. Steinbrink
Spiller, E. (2008 [1911]) Slums. Erlebnisse in den Schlammvierteln moderner Großstädte (Wien: Czernin Verlag).
Steinbrink, M. & Frehe, K. (2008) Townshiptourismus in Kapstadt: To go or NO GO, Praxis Geographie, 12, pp. 38–43.
Urry, J. (1990) The Tourist Gaze. Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage). Welz, G. (1993) Slum als Sehenswürdigkeit – ‘Negative Sightseeing’ im Städtetourismus, in: Kramer, R.
& Lutz, D. (Eds) Tourismus-Kultur, Kulturtourismus, pp. 38–43 (Hamburg: LIT Verlag).
D ow
nl oa
de d
by [
U ni
ve rs
it y
of S
tr at
hc ly
de ]
at 0
3: 15
2 8
A ug
us t
20 14