Covering slums in Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok and multiple cities in South Africa, Kenya and India, Slumming It examines the roots and consequences of a growing phenomenon whose effects have ranged from gentrification and urban policy reform to the organization of international development and poverty alleviation. Controversially, Frenzel argues that the rise of slum tourism has drawn attention to important global justice issues, and is far more complex than we initially acknowledged.
Covering slums in Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok and multiple cities in South Africa, Kenya and India, Slumming It examines the roots and consequences of a growing phenomenon whose effects have ranged from gentrification and urban policy reform to the organization of international development and poverty alleviation. Controversially, Frenzel argues that the rise of slum tourism has drawn attention to important global justice issues, and is far more complex than we initially acknowledged.
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Overview
Covering slums in Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok and multiple cities in South Africa, Kenya and India, Slumming It examines the roots and consequences of a growing phenomenon whose effects have ranged from gentrification and urban policy reform to the organization of international development and poverty alleviation. Controversially, Frenzel argues that the rise of slum tourism has drawn attention to important global justice issues, and is far more complex than we initially acknowledged.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783604463 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Dr Fabian Frenzel is postdoctoral Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Potsdam and lecturer in organization at the School of Management, University of Leicester. His primary research interest is in the political implications of travel, tourism and mobilities. A particular focus has been the study of social movements' and political activists' mobility. Frenzel has developed two distinct empirical research areas, the study of slum tourism and the study of protest camps in his own work and in collaboration with colleges in two vibrant research networks. He is co-author of the monograph Protest Camps (Zed Books 2013) and co-editor of the edited collections Slum Tourism, Poverty, Power, Ethics (Routledge 2012) and Geographies of Inequality (Routledge 2014). He has published widely in academic journals and also writes on current affairs in the UK and beyond for the German weekly Jungle World.
Read an Excerpt
Slumming It
The Tourist Valorization of Urban Poverty
By Fabian Frenzel
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2016 Fabian FrenzelAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78360-446-3
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Tourism and the slum
In 2014 over one million tourists visited a township, a favela, a barrio or a slum in some part of the world. By far the largest number visit South Africa's townships, where, since the end of apartheid, slum tourism has become a mass tourist activity. Rio's favelas and one large slum in Mumbai, Dharavi, also receive significant numbers of visitors. In a variety of locations around the world, slum tourism is now emerging as a niche form of tourism. Slum tourism takes place largely as three- to four-hour guided tours, but recent years have shown a remarkable diversification of tourism activities. Slum tourism takes place in vans and jeeps, but also as walking tours or on bikes. Beyond touring the slum, tourists today find accommodation in slums, and visit restaurants, bars, concert venues, markets or festivals. In Johannesburg, South Africa, it is possible to bungee-jump from the cooling towers of a disused power plant, overlooking the large cluster of townships that is Soweto (Frenzel et al. 2015).
Much of this recent trend in tourism emerged in South Africa and in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1990s. As a form of tourism it has spread from these two destinations, inspiring new destinations to provide similar offers. The first slum tours in India, founded in 2006 in Dharavi, Mumbai, as Reality Tour and Travel (RTT), were conceived when one of the founders visited Rio and took part in a tour there. In the meantime RTT has expanded to Delhi, has supported the set-up of slum tours in Manila, Philippines, and, importantly, inspired a number of competitors in Dharavi. In the countries neighbouring South Africa, including Zambia, Namibia and Zimbabwe, township and slum tours have emerged, building on the success of tours in Cape Town and Johannesburg. In Latin America, barrios have become tourist destinations in a number of cities, following the model of favela tourism in Rio de Janeiro (Freire-Medeiros 2013).
Tourist interest in slums has influenced policy-makers. In South Africa policy has attempted to use the tourism income streams for the cherished 'broad based black economic empowerment', attempting to make the tourism industry more beneficial for the country's black and often relatively poor majority. In Rio de Janeiro, favela tourism has been embraced and supported by policy in attempts to 'pacify' and normalize favelas and to create employment and income opportunities. In Medellín, Colombia, the city government improved the transport infrastructure of Medellín's barrios by constructing cable cars that provide access to the city. They also aimed at and succeeded in bringing tourists to the barrios, encouraged by building landmark architecture on the high platforms of the cable car. Tourists have since flocked into the barrios, very much as in Rio, where now two of these cable cars exist and double as resident and tourist modes of transport (Koens 2012; Steinbrink 2014; Freire-Medeiros et al. 2013; Rogerson 2004; Hernandez-Garcia 2013).
Slum tourism might be expanding today on a global scale, but it is not a new phenomenon. In Victorian London rich West Enders regularly visited the poor, slum-like East End. Areas and boroughs like Hackney, Shoreditch and Hoxton offered illicit consumption and entertainment, be it drugs, prostitution or gambling. But they also formed the object of a concerned public gaze that lamented moral deprivation, lack of hygiene and social injustice projected onto and reflected in the London slums. To Victorian slummers, the visits to the East End were spurred by curiosity, political agitation and charitable engagement, a fashion they carried to New York City, where immigrant slums, like the legendary Five Points, formed much of what is today midtown Manhattan (Koven 2004; Steinbrink 2012; Seaton 2012). Slumming in New York expanded in the early to mid twentieth century as Harlem became fashionable for urbanites seeking the latest underground music, access to drugs otherwise prohibited, and an atmosphere of hedonism and urban inclusivity (Heap 2009; Dowling 2009). Much of today's slum tourism was prefigured in these earlier examples, but there are also a number of differences, in terms of both scale and reach, but also with regard to the broader role of tourism in society. What is more, slum tourism does not occur in significant numbers in a period that stretches from the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the 1990s. Why did it return in the early 1990s?
The morals of slumming and the global social question
Rather than prompting broader inquiry, the curious phenomenon of slum tourism elicits strong opinions in the main. When I have discussed this book and my more general research interest in slum tourism, many people have asked me whether I think slum tourism is a good or a bad thing. Academics like sitting on the fence, but it is often helpful to critically think about the possible answers before trying to give a verdict. Quite a few observers tend to reject slum tourism outright as degrading and voyeuristic, and this is instinctively understandable. In a world that is characterized by increasing inequality, and which has been described famously as a 'planet of slums' by Mike Davis (2006), it might seem the pinnacle of cynicism when slums become tourist attractions. Tourism and slums, whose very name evokes associations of darkness, dirt and dread, seem to form an unsavoury contrast. Tourists, according to the common understanding, are travelling voluntarily, exercising a freedom that results to a large extent from their relative material wealth. To be wealthy and visit slums, to go slumming just for the thrill: this notion of slum tourism provokes moral outrage.
But for a critical analysis of slum tourism, moral outrage over the practice is not sufficient. A more neutral observer could ask: So what? Tourists do all sorts of things. If they also visit slums, why does that matter? My research has attempted to answer this question, and I present some answers in this book. From this perspective slum tourism matters first because it provides an empirical prism that allows one to reflect on the 'social question' and how it is answered. The social question arises when poverty and inequality become political concerns (Arendt 1990) – in other words when they are no longer seen as part of a natural order but as a product of a social order, one that has been created and can be changed by human beings. Arendt locates the emergence of the social question in the period of the French revolution, when a new bourgeois politics envisions the possibility of ending poverty and inequality. The social question is in this sense primarily a bourgeois concern with the fate of others, an issue that evokes questions of power and 'Othering'. Arendt's critique of a 'politics of pity' is concerned with these problems, and she posits the alternative of a 'politics of solidarity', pointing to a substantial and ongoing theoretical conversation at the heart of the social question. Empirically the social question has been posited and answered in diverse ways since the French revolution. This includes a sway of cultural and political artefacts, from Dickens's A Christmas Carol to policy interventions such as the minimum wage.
Arguably, slum tourism and some other associated forms of tourism also relate to the social question, insofar as they point to an interest, perhaps an unease, about poverty among those who are better off. Slums, and the associated poverty and inequality, are issues that tourists seem to feel some need to deal with. In this sense slum tourism is one of the many empirical domains, the cultural and symbolic practices, that attempt to come to terms with poverty and inequality.
If slum tourism is seen as a cultural practice in which the social question is posited and addressed, then moral outrage over its practice becomes more dubious. The representations of poverty in different domains, while often criticized, are rarely rejected as voyeuristic and cynical tout court. If tourism is understood as a discursive field in which the social question is negotiated, it potentially creates political spaces to develop responses to the social question. In opposition to what has been described as literary slumming (Williams 2008; Seaton 2012), literal slumming even increases the political potential because it enables encounters, takes place in contact zones and affects material cultures and the creation of infrastructures.
Slum tourism thus matters because it is an empirical domain in which the social question is posited, negotiated and sometimes addressed. Literary and literal slumming, symbolic and corporeal mobilities, interact to create spaces in which poverty and inequality become concerns. Other domains such as literature, but also urban development, anti-poverty policies, social work, humanitarianism, volunteering and international solidarity, closely relate because they follow similar discursive patterns, and they inspire and result from slum tourism. Slum tourism can thus be understood as an indicator of how the social question is addressed in particular historical periods. Victorian slumming differs from the contemporary forms in important ways, reflective of the different ways in which the social question is understood. The aforementioned absence of slum tourism between the Second World War and the early 1990s is also remarkable. Did this period have answers to the social question that made slum tourism unnecessary, or unwanted, and conversely might slum tourism be an indicator for the configuration of specific ways of addressing the social question, or what I will refer to in this book as specific regimes of care?
The concept of regime, used in this book, is based on reflections on the organization of production and social control. Accordingly a Fordist regime of production characterizes the period of industrial capitalism since the beginning of the last century and is followed by a post-Fordist regime from the 1970s. Fordism is originally a concept to describe industrial labour processes in the way pioneered in the Ford car factories (Harvey 1989). The notion of a Fordist regime extends the meaning of Fordism beyond the factory to describe various aspects of social organization, including such areas as tourism (Spode 2004; Urry 2002), but also housing provision and social care more generally, as discussed in this book. It is associated among other things with a strong role of the nation-state. The book reads the re-emergence of slum tourism since the end of the Cold War as concurrent with the development of a post-Fordist or neoliberal care regime which is at once characterized by a retrenchment of the state from the provision of social care and by an increasing globalization of the social question (Frenzel 2012). The occasions of slum tourism discussed in this book, then, might provide some contribution towards understanding how, in the current post-Fordist or neoliberal regime, attempts are made to posit and answer the social question. While it is impossible to comprehensively chart the post-Fordist or neoliberal care regime here, I hope to highlight that the empirical domain of slum tourism provides a fertile ground of investigation to approach this problem. At the very least I hope to show how useful such an endeavour can be, and to encourage and inspire further research. Moreover, the practices of slum tourists will be read in light of their potential to prefigure political alternatives, and to constitute mobile commons that point beyond the impositions of the post-Fordist care regime (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2012).
Tourism
Slum tourism also matters because it shows the power and complexity of the social phenomenon of tourism. Tourism is often derided as a leisure and consumption activity without much relevance. In the critique of slum tourism, but also more broadly in political and cultural takes on tourism, it is displayed as grotesque, ugly and at best pointless. More serious critique focuses on tourism's largely capitalist organization, or its links to and continuation of the colonial legacy. Even voices supportive of tourism tend to see its main value in its economics, understood as the revenue generated from services provided. As an industry tourism is supported and welcomed by policy-makers, business associations and even anti-poverty campaigners who pin their hopes on tourism's ability to generate employment and 'trickle down'.
These views are highly limited, and they need to be challenged. Like migration, tourism relies on transport and hospitality infrastructures that are mostly organized in a capitalist fashion and often on industrial scales. Like migration, tourism's main political, social and cultural effects should, however, not be reduced to its enabling infrastructures and their maintenance. Unlike migration, tourism's unique ability to shape the world is little acknowledged or discussed. Tourism is a social force (Higgins-Desbiolles 2006) and tourists are creating that force through their practices. Slum tourism matters because it offers an important example of the power of tourism to shape discourses, alter perceptions and make worlds (Meethan 2001; Picard and Robinson 2006; Sanyal 2015).
When tourists feel attracted to slums and low-income neighbourhoods, they behave contrary to the expectations of tourism officials. Rather than seeking out globally streamlined urban spaces, stainless steel architecture and sanitized urbanity, they look for places that they can also shape. It is now broadly acknowledged that consumers are involved in co-producing the value of brands, places or websites (Arvidsson 2005;Beverungen et al. 2015). Tourists are part of place-making, the creation of attractions, the production of experiences (Richards and Wilson 2006). Rojek (2010) has coined the concept of the 'labour of leisure', describing thus the organization of leisure as recreation but also the educational formation of the labour force. But there is more to the idea of tourism as labour when we consider tourism to be a values-producing practice (De Angelis 2004). Such production of values will affect localities and their value regimes, add new layers of meaning to places and intervene in political and symbolic conflicts. As a value practice, tourism can become labour when it is captured as value by capital. But prior to such value capture, there is what could be called the 'autonomy of tourism', to reference similar discussions in migration studies (Papadopoulos et al. 2008; Mezzadra and Neilson 2008). The autonomy of tourism suggests that tourist value practices express a desire to be rebellious, to be a tourist producer, out of curiosity, in exploration and interaction. While this is often captured in structures of exploitation and in the prefabricated nature of much of the existing tourist experience, tourist value practices can be considered autonomous and free of such capture in the first instance.
The book thus provides a theoretical reading of the power of tourism through the concept of tourist valorization. Tourist valorization is understood as the result of value practices, that is, acts of tourists that lead to a change in the perception of and the broadly defined value of a place. Tourist valorization captures the ability of tourists to add layers of meaning to existing locations. It can be disruptive when new meanings and valorization disturb established valorizations. The book argues and shows that by putting slums on the map, through a number of different practices, tourists can contribute to advancing social and political justice for residents of slums.
Shame
When analysing why tourism is so little understood and why slum tourism in particular raises such fierce moral outrage it is important to highlight the role of shame. Shame is the curious common denominator of poverty and tourism. Shame is used against the poor by the non-poor, and often internalized by the poor. Stigma and shame form a central part of the social organization and justification of inequality, and this is apparent across cultural contexts (Walker 2014; Lister 2004; Wacquant 2008). Since the emergence of the political 'social question' in the eighteenth century, the role of shame and stigma has become somewhat more central in the management of inequality. Because once poverty is no longer understood as a natural phenomenon, the question emerges of who is to blame for it. By rejecting responsibility the non-poor have increasingly resorted to blaming and shaming the poor – for example, by attesting that they are unwilling to work. Shaming the poor also takes place through discourses of dirt, limited hygiene and moral deprivation (Walker 2014; Gubrium et al. 2013, Tyler 2013). When slum tourism gets criticized there is often an explicit or implicit discussion of shame to the effect that people in poverty should not be seen and looked at because their condition is somehow shameful. We need to critically reflect on such statements. If slum residents are feeling ashamed, then who told them to be and with what intention? If local elites insinuate that slums are shameful, is it the right answer for tourists to just ignore their existence?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Slumming It by Fabian Frenzel. Copyright © 2016 Fabian Frenzel. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction2. Tourism and the Social Question
3. The Slum and the City
4. Value Practices and Tourist Falorization
5. Slums in Local Value Regimes
6. Disruptive Valorization: Putting Slums on the Map
7. Co-opting and Engineering Tourist Valorization: Policy and Real Estate Responses
8. Tourist Valorization in the Post-Fordist Care Regime
9. Slum Tourism and Political Activism
10. Conclusion