Slum Tourism

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Slum Tourism: Crass Voyeurism or Enlightened Tourism?

**Dharavi Slum in Mumbai, India**
Photo: Kounosu via Creative Commons

Slum tourism has been around for some time but the release of the movie Slumdog Millionnaire has jumped it up to massive proportions.

The movie's release may have caused tourism to Mumbai's slums to skyrocket, but there are plenty of other poor places that have been on tourist maps for years.

Take the favelas of Rio de Janeiro (or the equivalent in many South American mega-cities), which cling precariously to mountainsides towering over luxury high-rises below. Equally popular are tours to the townships around Johannesburg. A little off the beaten path you'll be able to see how street children live underground in New Delhi...
Poverty isn't exactly difficult to find.

**Ethical or exploitative?**
Photo: Greg Younger via Flickr

The question here is whether slum tourism is ethically acceptable or whether it's exploitative voyeurism at its worst.

The answer is that it's a bit of both.

Riding a city bus through a poor area protected by glazed windows in the plush comfort of air conditioning doesn't seem right. Yet if some of the profits are plowed back into the community, there might be a justification for it. Slum tourism might also be acceptable if it makes an effort to connect the tourist with the community in some way.

If you have friends in the city you're visiting, they might have contacts with community groups or non-governmental organizations working in some of these areas.

I was once taken through some of Rio's most crowded favelas by a young community nurse who worked with drug addicts and knew everyone. He was respected and we were stopped on every corner for a bit of a chat.

The afternoon I spent in the favela gave me a better understanding of the poverty that fuels the desperation behind addiction and crime, something I certainly would not have learned from the back of a slum tourism bus.

**Favela in Rio de Janeiro**
Photo: anthony_goto via Flickr

It also showed me a side I would never have expected - the regular everyday life of people less fortunate than myself. The streets were dirty and the housing rickety but people came and went, shopped, talked, laughed - and went to work, just like everyone else.

Oddly enough, not everyone was poor, either. Some dwellings were decidedly middle-class, as are those in the Jo'Burg townships. Perhaps people who worked their way out of poverty preferred to stay close to their roots and near friends and families...

Still, over the years visits to poorer urban areas have left me unsettled. Children sniffing glue under a bridge in Brasilia. Mothers scavenging for scraps on the world's highest scrap heap in Manila. Begging for food near a Nairobi slum. Homeless children in India or Malawi. These are scenes that drive home the accident of humanity, of where I was born and where they were.

That said, not everyone has access to community workers and if you feel inclined to take a tour, at least make sure it isn't an intrusive one, filled with dozens of snap-happy day-trippers who will treat a slum tourism event the same way as a regular tourist jaunt.

Remember, the people you are visiting are people no different from you. Imagine if busloads of foreign people far wealthier than you toodled through your own neighborhood, taking pictures and pointing at your house.

How would that make you feel?

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