Tourism Analysis

Case Study

Slum Tourism: Development, Globalization

and the Implications of a new Trend in
Tourism

Dr Kostas Tomazos
October 2014
Discuss…

“Tourism is one of the few ways

that you or I are ever going to
understand what poverty means”
Weiner (2008: 1)
Introduction…
 Slum tourism can be described as a
form of poverty tourism where tourists
visit poor communities in deprived
areas (Dovey and King, 2012; Ma,
2010).
 Slum tours commonly include visits to
workplaces and homes of residents,
schools and community projects. Slum
tourism comes in many forms all across
the world and currently includes tours
of favelas in Brazil, townships in South
Africa, and slums in India, villas in
Argentina and poor areas in many
other countries in the Global South.

“Slum tourism is one of the fastest-growing

niche tourism segments in the world, but it
is also one of the most controversial.”
(Ma, 2010: 3)
 Short History…
 Slum tourism originates from the 1800s
when the term “slumming” was used to
describe wealthy people in society who
visited poorer urban areas in their leisure
time; the roots lie in London (Steinbrink,
2012; Dürr, 2012; Seaton, 2012).
 It was in 1884 when the term “slumming”
was recognised by the Oxford English
Dictionary (Loftus, 2009).
 During the 19th century journalists made
their names by writing of their slum travels
(Seaton, 2012). The “hobo” and “tramp”
cultures in slumming offered an escape
from normal life for the wealthy (Seaton,
2012).
 Slumming then developed in the USA
where slum tours became very much
commercialised – it became open to a
wider range of people who where willing to
consume this tourism product (Steinbrink,
2012; Seaton, 2012).
 Wealthy tourists from
London imported
slumming eager to visit
and compare the poorer
areas in New York with
‘their’ slums at home

 Tourist Guide books

 Guided slum tours
 New York, Chicago and
San Francisco
 Not just about Poverty…
• On the one hand, slum tourism
developed in areas with social and
economic problems.
• However, historically in places like Little
Italy, Chinatown and other ghettos in
New York City, people were secluded
because they were minority immigrant
groups (Conforti, 1996; Seaton, 2012).
• Slumming tours mainly took place in the
urban areas where the new immigrant
groups had settled because of their rich
culture (Seaton, 2012).

Some authors see slum tourism as authentic or reality tourism (Freire-Medeiros,

2009; Frisch, 2012) where tourists encounter urban realism. On the other hand,
some see it as cultural or ethnic tourism (Ramchander, 2007; Jaguaribe and
Hetherington, 2004, cited in Rolfes, 2010: 422).
Slums Falling out of Fashion…

 Eventually these deprived

areas were becoming a
problem for economic
development and governments
began removing them from the
city borders (Seaton, 2012).
 The justification for this was
that tourists would not want to
visit cities that were associated
with poverty and unsanitary
conditions (Freire-Medeiros,
2009).
From Slumming to Slum Tourism…
 Existing literature on the
expansion of slum tourism in the
developing world centres on the
evolution of the trend in a few
distinct areas: South Africa,
Brazil, India, Kenya and Mexico
 Steinbrink (2012) states that
figures indicate slum tourism is
already a highly professionalised
business in South Africa and
Brazil.
 Steinbrink et al (2012) discuss
the development of slum tourism
in these areas as well as minor
forms of the trend developing in
Argentina, Namibia, Egypt,
Indonesia, Jamaica and
Thailand.
 South Africa…

 Tourism in South Africa’s townships

has developed hugely since the end
of the apartheid era.
 Government policy in South Africa
now supports the stream of tourism
into townships (Frenzel and Koens,
2012).
 In townships tourism started off as a
“niche market” for people with
specific political interests (Rolfes,
2010:428).
 Emergence of township tourism is
said to be a phenomenon of the post
apartheid period after South Africa’s
move towards a democracy in 1994
(Rogerson, 2004; Stenbrink, 2012;
Steinbrink et al, 2012).
 Brazil…
 In Brazil, tourism has grown and
evolved in the larger, main favelas
and has become a key part of tourist
exploration (Frisch, 2012).
 The increase in favela tours has been
highlighted as an effect of the United
Nations Earth Summit in 1992
(Frenzel, 2012). Freire-Medeiros
(2009) relates this rising popularity of
favela tours to the increasing demand
for alternative forms of travelling
referring to the desire for “reality
tours” and the “extreme other”
(p.581).
 Frisch (2012) explains that the favela
has had to undertake many stages of
progression for it to be transformed
into a tourist attraction.

Although these areas of poverty can provide authentic and genuine experiences, some
considerable transformation has to take place in order for them to become valued tourist areas.
This can therefore allow questions to arise about the authenticity of certain slum tours.
India…

 Slum tours in India are very much a

new phenomenon and this is evident
as only a few individual tour operators
detail the content of the tours on the
internet (Rolfes, 2010).
 In Mumbai slum tours are provided
by one main agency Reality Tours
and Travel which has offered tours to
Dharavi since 2006 (Rolfes, 2010;
Ma, 2010).
 However, slum tourism in India is
noticeably expanding and this is said
to be fuelled mainly by media
attention from films such as Slumdog
Millionaire (Steinbrink, 2012).
 Kenya…

 The Kibera slum in Nairobi, is

thought to have become
involved in slum tours in a
similar pattern to Rio de Janeiro,
after the World Social Forum
meetings in 2007 (Frenzel,
2012; Steinbrink et al, 2012).
 Steinbrink et al (2012)
additionally observe that today
there are a range of tour
operators organising slum tours
in the Kibera slum.
 Mexico…
 Fieldwork by Dürr (2012)
investigates a form of slum
tourism that takes place
around a garbage dump in the
town of Mazatlan, Mexico

 This tour is carried out by a

non-profit based evangelical
church which takes tourists on
an “enlightening, meaningful
and engaging experience”
(Dürr, 2012: 341).

 This example of slum tourism

aiming to educate people and
support local communities is
free of charge and emphasises
variations in slum tours.
Drivers of Slum Tourism…

As with all new trends,

queries arise as to why the
trend has occurred at this
time and in this social
context. The same questions
are applied to new forms of
tourism (Steinbrink et al,
2012).

Do you have any ideas?

 Reality Tourism…
 Freire-Medeiros (2009: 582) defines
two types of reality tourism: “dark”
and “social”.
 Slum tourism comes under the
heading of “social” tourism - differing
from dark tourism - where
participation and authenticity is sold
in a way that counteracts mass
tourism (Freire-Medeiros, 2009).
 Such experiences of social and dark
tourism are popular with travellers as
they seek more experiences that are
“interactive” and “adventurous”
(Freire-Medeiros, 2009:582).
 The product given to tourists may be
different in each case; however the
motivations for going on both types of
reality tours are very similar.
Societal Changes and Events…
 Frenzel (2012) observes that certain events
throughout the world have prompted slum
tourism in certain areas.

 Regarding South Africa, the literature

suggests that township tours began because
of apartheid and the political revolution that
took place against a racist government
(Rogerson, 2004; Rolfes, 2010; Stenbrink,
2012; Steinbrink et al, 2012).

 This differs from the cases of Brazil and

Kenya where it is proposed that events
drawing attention to global issues generated
the practice of slum tourism.

 Frenzel (2012) suggests that the Rio

Summit in 1992 played a significant role in
generating favela tours.

 Similarly, it is discussed that the World

Social Forum in 2007 initiated a rise in slum
tourism in Nairobi (Frenzel and Koens,
2012).
 Films and Popular Media…
 The media today have created interest amidst
audiences who want to witness these locations
in real life rather than on screen

 Recently certain films have gained international

attention illustrating slum life: Slumdog
Millionare, City of God and District 9. Slum
tourism has increased in demand as a tourist
product in these areas because of such films
(Freire-Medeiros, 2009; Ma 2010; Rolfes, 2010;
Dyson, 2012).

 Subsequently, a link can be made with slum

tourism to film tourism research in Mumbai,
particularly due to the release of Slumdog
Millionaire (Frenzel and Koens, 2012).

 In addition, documentaries shown in the United

States have given viewers desirable images of
favelas (Freire-Medeiros, 2009).

Hannam and Knox (2010) stress that tourists are attracted to a destination
because they are strange and out of the ordinary and such images are broadly
publicized in the mass media
 Globalization…
 Globalisation has allowed new
opportunities for developments in tourism
(Reisinger, 2009).

 New consumers are showing behaviour

patterns away from mass-market package
holidays and as a result of improvements
in communication, consumers have been
disclosed to different cultures, widening
their ideas and viewpoints (Reisinger,
2009).

 Cejas and De Mexico (2006) note that

poor and deprived environments in the
third world have become a commodity for
tourists in developing countries because of
globalisation.

 Additionally, Urry (1990) recognises that

globalisation is facilitating the creation of
new forms of tourism.
Food for Thought…

“…these tours cross the boundary of conventional tourism; they bring the
contrasts between the First and Third worlds… into sharp relief”
(Dyson, 2012:271

Slum tourism can open windows to new ways of seeing and thinking.
Slum tourism seems certain to open “shock, horror, delight and political
activism…” to “…Western eyes” (Dovey and King, 2012:292).

Some tour guides say that too many companies operate “safari style”
tours with busloads of tourists taking photos and gazing at the poverty
(Ramchander, 2007)

Can tourists make any difference at all through slum tourism?

Your Assignment…

In no more than 3,000 words (tables and figures

do not count) you have to build a case study on a
slum tour (operator) that organizes tours at a slum
of your choice.
The case study should include:

a) A literature section on slum tourism

b) A information section on the slum itself
c) A very brief description of the methods you
used to build your case study
d) A presentation of your findings
e) What do your findings mean?
f) Conclusion
Some Ideas…

 Ambiguity surrounding types of

tours and the diversity in
experiences offered.
 Different causes and drivers of
slum tourism in different areas
across the globe.
 Slum tourist motivations
reflecting a new type of tourist
preference and new niche form
of tourism.
 The opportunities and risks that
slum tourism may entail
 A bit of help…
Language used on Websites…
Theme Issue

Reality See the real India, Walk into the street life of Delhi, Experience a part of Kenya unseen by most tourists, Reveal the true
essence of the country, Show tourists the city through the eyes of the locals, Get a glimpse of this gritty side of the
country, Real Indonesian culture, Experience and discover the real Jakarta, See for yourself how the people of South
Africa live

Real Time You’ll witness children playing, You’ll witness the heart of small scale industry, You will see their homes, their work
places, Visitors can see children in their classes and in activities, Experience a day in the life of locals, Interact with locals
as they go about their daily routine

Optimism Many rags-to-riches stories, You will see their spirit, A city of hope, A new understanding about aspects of the country’s
culture, Experience the lively streets, Experience vibrant soul of the township, Feel the spirit of togetherness, sharing,
giving and unity among the people of townships, There is a strong community spirit

Chaos You’ll witness a riot of activity, from small industries to children playing, An area bustling with activity, See residents
make the most of what they have

Local/community life Tourists will feel the sense of community and spirit that exists, Friendliest slum in the world, Hear traditional music,
Purchase hand made arts and crafts
Wanderlust/escapism Experience a place unseen by most tourists, New understanding of a different culture, See different aspects of another society,
Historical and social education about the slum

Off the beaten track/look behind the Discovering places that are too hard usually to discover as a tourist, Must stay in the car in the red light area, See people in their
scenes homes and workplaces, A journey through the back streets of the city, The dangers make it hard to see what really goes on in these
areas of poverty

Unique experience Add a dash of colour to your stay, Rags-to-riches stories, Unique way of providing an insight into lives of street children, Aim to
provide a unique and memorable experience of the country, Experience the area in a new and exciting way, Tour offers intimacy
that would otherwise not be available to tourists, Offer an alternative means of tourism, A once in a lifetime travel adventure, Take
a journey into a world of colour, contrast, unique cultural flavour and a new understanding of South Africa, It’s a must do for every
visitor to Cape Town to experience a day in the life of locals

Exclusivity Group sizes of maximum 5 or 6 people, Groups are kept to a small number to ensure a personal visit, Private tours available to be
individually designed for you to do and see as much or as little as you please, Aim to offer a more personal touristic experience,
Private tour hidden from mass media, This form of tourism is a new idea in the world

Aid in poverty alleviation/improving lives An opportunity for street children to improve their communication skills, Donate money and clothes at the end of the tour, Know
that you can make a difference, Contemplate adopting or fostering a child
Case Study Slum Tourism
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Slum tourism: Patronising or social
enlightenment?

By James Melik Reporter, Business Daily, BBC World Service

There is a growing trend for tourists to seek out poverty-blighted neighbourhoods when they
go on holiday, to get a sense of real life for the poorest communities there.

An increasing number of tourists are searching for something they cannot get at the top of
the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the foot of the Statue of Liberty in New York.

This controversial trend has been dubbed "slum tourism".

Six years ago in India, Krishna Pujari and his British friend Chris Way began Reality Tours
and Travel, to organise tours in Dharavi - arguably Asia's biggest slum.

Sitting on one of Mumbai's prime sites, Dharavi is the city's underbelly, where squalor mixes
with enterprise.

The area is dotted with small businesses and recycling units, sitting alongside residential
enclaves.

It produces goods worth $1bn ($620m) and a lot of its products are exported and yet, most
of its one million inhabitants are impoverished and live in what the outside world may call
inhuman conditions.

Dharavi is essentially a magnet for migrants from poor rural areas in other parts of the
country, who travel to Mumbai to earn a livelihood for themselves and often for their family
back home.

They are mostly garbage pickers, taxi drivers, manual labourers - the nameless, faceless
people who keep a largely thankless city afloat

Diverse opinions

"If you think this is just poverty, you will see that only," says Mr Pujari, "but in the poverty
there is much to be learnt."

He tries to show a positive side of the slum, to people who think slums are just about
poverty, danger or begging.

He explains how his company is a social business with 80% of all profits given to its sister
organisation - the charity Reality Gives.
"We do we do this because a large percentage of our income is generated through the
Dharavi tours and we felt that it was right to put most of the money back," Mr Pujari asserts.

Tourists do not see the organised slum tour as an example of exploiting poverty.

Florence Martina, a tourist from France, is not apologetic about touring Dharavi.

"These people are fighting against poverty, they are active in building some commerce and
trade," she says.

Meanwhile, Christian Hansen from San Francisco says: "The most interesting thing is the
working conditions of the people. I didn't expect them to be so industrial."

But local people say they do not benefit from slum tours.

"It doesn't help me at all," says Prasad, who is a trader in Dharavi.

"We see foreigners several times a week. Sometimes they come and talk to us, some offer
us a bit of cash, but we don't get anything from these tours," he laments.

Wrong message

Not everyone is happy about how their city is portrayed to the outside world.

"The educated urban Indian is a tad sensitive about how certain attributes of Indian history,
society and culture are portrayed in the western media," says Mumbai resident Hemanth
Gopinath.

"The Oscar-winning film Slum Dog Millionaire, for all its success, was not well received by
certain sections of the popular press in India," he recalls.

"And more recently, Oprah Winfrey drew a lot of flak for how, many felt, she was insensitive
in her exchanges with a family in Dharavi," he notes.

He maintains that any criticism against the tour company in question, is that they highlight a
negative aspect of the country to foreign citizens and also possibly engage in profiteering at
the expense of the underprivileged.

"However, if they can positively impact even a minuscule section of the population of
Dharavi, I would support it," he says.

Fatal attraction

What is it about the slums that attracts hordes of tourists each year?

Dr Malte Steinbrink at the University of Osnabruck in Germany, says: "We are currently
witnessing a tremendous growth in slum tourism worldwide, especially in the global south."

He notes that the trend started in Victorian London over 150 years ago, when people from
the London upper class were curious to see what happened in the East End.
In the global south it is a quite recent phenomenon - starting at the beginning of the 1990s in
South Africa after the end of apartheid, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

"Tourists came to South Africa and wanted to see the townships and places of the apartheid
repression and Mandela's house - so it began as a niche tourism for tourists with a special
political interest," says Dr Steinbrink.

About 300-400,000 tourists a year visit the townships - between one-fifth and one-quarter of
all tourists who visit South Africa.

"If we ask why slum tourism is on the rise at the moment, one could assume it is because
there are more and more slums and more people who live in them worldwide," he says.

According to the World Tourist Organisation, one billion people are expected to travel in
2012, so the increase in the number of travellers opting for slum tourism is likely to rise.

NOW PLEASE REFLECT ON WHAT

YOU HAVE READ AND COMMENT
ON THE PROLIFERATION AND
POPULARITY OF SLUM TOURISM!
 Vol. 144, No. 2 · Research article

Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible

tourism with educational value: Observing
DIE ERDE moral communication in slum and
Journal of the
Geographical Society
of Berlin
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, mrolfes@uni-potsdam.de, julia.burgold@uni-potsdam.de

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.

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.

Keywords Slum tourism, township tourism, morality, place

Burgold, Julia and Manfred Rolfes: Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral
­c ommunication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai. – DIE ERDE 144 (2): 161-174

DOI: 10.12854/erde-144-12

DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013 161

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
162
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
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 Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value:
Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
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-
DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
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 capacity 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 after 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
163
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value:
Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
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
164
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-
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Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
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).
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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
165
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
166
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
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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-
DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
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-
167
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
168
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.
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
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,
DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
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
169
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 ­f inancial 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”.
170
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
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Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
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
DIE ERDE · Vol. 144 · 2/2013
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
171
Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value:
Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai
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 takes
place, the term ‘Global South’ is used in this article for
at least two reasons: First, the notion “developing coun-
tries” should be avoided, because it has the negative
connotation of “underdevelopment”. Moreover, the term
‘Global South’ better takes account of the multiple glob-
al linkages and socio-economic fragmentations 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).
3Freire-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
172
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).
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 Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 2092–2113, 2012
0160-7383/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Printed in Great Britain
www.elsevier.com/locate/atoures
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2012.07.006

RESPONSIBLE SLUM TOURISM:

EGYPTIAN EXPERIENCE
Moustafa A. Mekawy
Menoufiya University, Egypt

Abstract: This paper aims to evaluate stakeholders’ views on the potential role that slum
tourism and its associated products can play in enhancing living conditions in slums in Egypt.
Empirical results were obtained using two quantitative surveys: one to investigate dwellers’
perceptions and a second to select appropriate pro-poor products based on stakeholders’
preferences. Findings show that inhabitants have positive attitudes toward the possibility of
benefiting from slum tourism, but they differed in their ranking of the appropriateness of
related pro-poor products. Based on findings, authorities should develop appropriate slum
tourism products and typologies, as a planning threshold, to enhance living conditions of
dwellers. A useful planning way of drawing ties between slum types and typologies is
presented. Keywords: slum tourism, Ashwa’iyyat, responsible, planning, Greater
Cairo. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION
Slum tourism has been defined as tourism that involves visiting
impoverished areas. It is sometimes called poverty tourism or slumming
or seeing how the other half lives (Cejas, 2006; Diekmann & Hannam,
2012; Manyara, Jones, & Botterill, 2006; Williams, 2008). Slum tourism
is getting plenty of attention today as a practice that should be subject
to responsible reflection (Goodwin, 2011b). The primary question that
will be explored is whether or not responsible tourism is beneficial to
the alleviation of poverty in Egyptian slums. Notably, using tourism as
a vehicle for sustainable development is now becoming an important
item on the agendas of public policy planners. However, how to use
tourism as a potential tool in fighting poverty is still being explored
by international and national organizations as well as by local govern-
ments and authorities (Clancy, 1999; Jiang, DeLacy, Mkiramweni, &
Harrison, 2011; Neves, 2006; Spenceley & Meyer, 2012).

Moustafa A. Mekawy is a Senior Lecturer of Tourism Management, at the University of

Menoufiya (Tourism Studies Department, Faculty of Tourism and Hotels Management, El
Sadat City, Postal Code: 32897, Egypt. Email <mekawymoustafa@yahoo.com>). His principal
research interests include poverty reduction, models and typologies, managing needs;
expectations; and satisfactions, investment and strategic planning in the tourism sector. He
has undertaken researches and consultancies in Egypt, KSA and the UK.

2092
 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113 2093

Concepts relating to responsible tourism and its associated products

have also received the attention of tourism researchers, planners and
professionals as the industry has rapidly developed (Blake, Arbache,
Sinclair, & Teles, 2008; Cattarinich, 2001; Harrison, 2008). However,
unlike at the international level, research into suitable pro-poor tour-
ism products and into developing planning approaches with the inten-
tion of improving slum inhabitants’ living conditions has not been a
particular focus of Egyptian researchers and planners. Hence, the
broad purpose of this study is twofold: to enhance the understanding
of responsible tourism activities and pro-poor tourism products that
have a positive effect on living conditions in the different types of
Greater Cairo’s (GC) Ashwa’iyyat (Arabic for slums), and to explore
how poverty reduction practices can be applied in a responsible man-
ner to these informal settlements in Egypt in order to meet the aspira-
tions of their inhabitants, thereby converting these settlements into
destination slums.

SLUM TOURISM AND RESPONSIBILITY ISSUES

This section seeks to examine the extent to which recent literature
on slum tourism can help recognize some of GC’s slums’ characteristic
paradoxes and to verify the possible role of poor areas in supporting
slum tourism experiences (Manyara et al., 2006). It is argued that while
these paradoxes exist, the way that they are understood and addressed
on a national level and from a theoretical level has been constrained by
the lack of engagement of Egyptian tourism planners and researchers
with wider debates, in the majority of the ongoing projects that intend
to improve GC’s slum conditions. Existing national notions do not ex-
plain the growing international trend of slum-based tourism. Rather,
several recent authors have clearly indicated that most of today’s slums
are destinations and focal points for many authentic reality tourist itin-
eraries (Cejas, 2006).
In an attempt to verify the role of slums’ forms and features in pro-
moting the slum tourism experience, the contradictory debates over
some key characteristics relating to the importance of GC’s slums for
tourism are demonstrated below. For example, when looking at GC’s
Ashwa’iyyat as ‘‘high-density slums,’’ it is paradoxical to view this char-
acteristic as helpful, because it addresses a key issue underlying a wider
debate by recognizing the slums as sources of human capital for tour-
ism rather than as impoverished areas to live in (Cejas, 2006). This
study also addresses the potential that GC’s slums have of being a
‘‘tourism economic power,’’ which may lead to the dwellers’ emancipa-
tion if they are used as a main source of tourism products based on the
slums’ resources (Cheong & Miller, 2000).
For instance, labor-intensive products such as handicrafts for tourists
were traditionally located in the old quarter of al-Gamaliya near Khan
al-Khalili, the largest tourist bazaar in Egypt. However, it seems that
when demand for these goods increased due to a massive rise in the
number of tourists, wage laborers left the old workshops in central
2094 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113

Cairo and established their own small-scale manufacturing enterprises

in the mega slum of Manshiet Nasser, one of GC’s Ashwa’iyyat (Séjourné,
2009). This is illustrative of how convenient, responsible tourism prod-
ucts from GC’s Ashwa’iyyat systems of production can generate greater
economic benefits for inhabitants and can improve working conditions
and access to industry (Ashley & Roe, 2002; Hall, 2007; Salençon, 2004;
Séjourné, 2009). This article argues that while increased national inter-
est has been given to understanding GC’s slum types, there have also
been many missed opportunities in terms of their possible tourism pro-
duction resources (Khalifa, 2011; Sabry, 2009; Séjourné, 2009). The
next section reviews a wider planning perspective to explore the Ash-
wa’iyyat’s types and their proposed tourism products.

GC’s Ashwa’iyyat Resources and Types: A Useful Planning Threshold

Many researchers think that research that sought to document re-
sources and types of slums in tourism literature during the early to
mid-2000s produced essential baseline data (Goodwin, 2011b; Mitchell
& Ashley, 2010). As a result of their efforts, most scholars accept that
although some slum resources tend to be useful for producing
pro-poor products, most do not (Manyara et al., 2006). This ‘‘baseline’’
effort also reveals the limitations of using the ‘‘slum production
resources’’ term in tourism to categorize all products of a certain slum
type (Ashley & Goodwin, 2007). The heterogeneity of this constituency
leads this study to propose a useful planning way of drawing ties be-
tween slum resources and slum type characteristics in tourism during
the following discussion. Initially, economists identified three re-
sources of production: labor, land and capital. More recently, three
types of capital have been recognized: physical, human and natural
(Tassone & Van der Duim, 2010).
For planning and poverty, many academics note that any pro-poor
product should aim to expand benefits to the poor and to present
practical steps to authorities that can transform strategies into concrete
actions for the improved living conditions of dwellers (Croes & Vane-
gas, 2008; Goodwin, 2011b). Arguably, that production of pro-poor
products should be based on innovative investment in unique charac-
teristics of each slum type, and these products’ development requires
adopting a collaborative and responsible planning approach. This
endeavors to reduce negative impacts and costs of production while
recognizing and minimizing negative impacts on the host community
and maintaining positive impacts on slum living conditions (Haywood,
1988; Hutnyk, 1996; McGehee, 2012; Mitchell & Ashley, 2010). The
current study proposes that GC’s slum resources can support sustain-
able development of ‘‘responsible’’ slum tourism in a reliable planning
manner that can help create improved places for dwellers to live and
for tourists to visit (Butler, 1999).
Research on Egyptian slums suggests that GC’s Ashwa’iyyat come in
many types (Sabry, 2009). Based on reviewed literature, Table 1 sum-
marizes possible different types, listing key descriptions, resources
 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113 2095

Table 1. GC’s Ashwa’iyyat Types Descriptions, Resources and Products

Ashwa’iyyat types Description What do characteristics of slum types tell us?

Possible tourism Possible slum tourism

production products/typologies
resources examples

Type one Slums on Human capital: Traditional rural food &

subdivided –Tourism drink celebrations.
former craftsmen.
agricultural land, Physical capital:
where the builder –Prior irrigation
has purchased patterns.
land informally Natural capital:
from other –Agriculture fields.
owners.
Type two Informal Human capital: Urban family visits.
settlements on –NGOs/
state-owned community
(desert) land, associations’ activities.
where the dweller Physical capital:
has only a ‘hand –Private residential
claim’ (Wadaa’ yed buildings.
in Arabic) or a Natural capital:
leasehold. –Desert lands &
flora.
Type three In the historic city Human capital: Traditional market
of Cairo before –Sacrificing families visits.
the expansions that educate children.
beginning after Physical capital:
1860, there are –Historic cities/
neighborhoods villages.
with a high Natural capital:
percentage of old, –Natural wetlands.
crowded, and
deteriorating
structures within
a medieval, urban
setting.
Type four This type exists in Human capital: Volunteer tours.
the ancient –Very poor people.
Islamic Physical capital:
cemeteries in –Monumental
Cairo and is not cemeteries.
common in other Natural capital:
urban centers, –Highly calcareous
where many poor loams.
Egyptians have
made these
cemeteries’
rooms their
permanent
homes.
2096 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113

and products in each category. The current review accentuates the

planning way presented in Table 1, which tends to reflect much of
the analysis contained in this article. In so doing, following the ap-
proach used by the Informal Settlement Development Facility (ISDF,
2009), it distinguishes between four types of GC’s Ashwa’iyyat. The
four-part typology was developed as an attempt to solve the problem-
atic urban planning issue of what counts as a slum in Egypt (ISDF,
2009). This division was made by replacing the term ‘‘Ashwa’iyyat’’ with
two distinctive terms, ‘‘unplanned areas’’ and ‘‘unsafe areas.’’ This ap-
proach is considered to underpin the identification of priorities for
intervention and the drawing up of strategies for improving slums’ con-
ditions and the lives of their inhabitants (Khalifa, 2011).
According to ISDF (2009), an unsafe area is characterized by life
threatening conditions or inappropriate housing; these areas are out
of this study’s scope. Unplanned areas are spaces that were developed
in violation of planning and building laws and regulations (Khalifa,
2011). Recognizing the importance of the approach adopted by ISDF
(2009), this paper highlights some conceptual planning guidelines
that have brought the four-type classification to the kind of division
suggested in Table 1. As will be noticed, the description of the four
types emphasizes settlements, which infringe the Egyptian planning
law, i.e., are informal settlements rather than slums, in the sense of hav-
ing unsafe and unhealthy conditions (Sabry, 2009). For that reason,
the current review probably highlights a novel area of research for
planning that could be used to connect possible slum resources and
types in tourism, and ultimately, this may help in shaping pro-poor
products.

Tourism and Ashwa’iyyat: Debatable Issues

Many of the potential avenues of slum tourism research remain open
to critical enquiry. Little is understood, for example, about why some
researchers tend to confirm a positive relationship between slum tour-
ism growth and possible stress on existing infrastructure, while others
do not (Meschkank, 2011; Rolfes, 2010). Apparently, there are partial
insights from studies that have been undertaken in improving infra-
structure research, and much remains to be done. As a result, it is
claimed here that researching slums’ upgrading strategies, governmen-
tal planning approaches and the effective involvement of inhabitants,
for instance, will enable a clearer understanding of how slums’ infra-
structure might be sustained by the main stakeholders (Perdue, Long,
& Allen, 1990). Increasing the numbers of tourists visiting GC’s Ash-
wa’iyyat could lead to burdening the existing infrastructure. However,
the ever-increasing number of dwellers exerts tremendous pressure
on basic urban services as well as on infrastructure (Séjourné, 2009).
Within the context of proposed collaborative and responsible
planning approaches, this review disagrees with the claim that slums’
infrastructure is overused by tourists. On the contrary, it argues that
it is the absence of planning thresholds that causes this. Additionally,
 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113 2097

it appears that the problem is both a lack of responsible support on the

part of government plans toward dwellers and a failure in honoring
their rights as citizens (McGehee & Santos, 2005; Zeng & Ryan,
2012). One possible explanation of this claim is that most of the visits
to slums take the form of a half-day tour, intended to show tourists how
people live therein (Duarte, 2010). This means that the existing infra-
structure in GC’s Ashwa’iyyat is probably not being overused in the
short term. Thus, it is imperative to draw up a coherent governmental
action plan for the implementation of infrastructure projects aimed at
achieving sustainability (Thorne, 2011).
Further, it is argued that one of the research challenges is to rethink
tourists’ motivations currently in fashion within the wider domain of
volunteer tourism research (Brown, 2005; Uriely, Reichel, & Ron,
2003). To enrich discussion in this area, this paper argues that ques-
tions such as ‘‘Why do tourists tend to visit GC’s slums?’’ and ‘‘Who
are the slum tourists?’’ are closely related. Answers to the first may pro-
duce the slum tourists’ motivational framework, and that may help in
answering the second question. Accordingly, it is useful to build upon
Lo and Lee’s (2011) study of volunteer tourism and motivations for tra-
vel. Three of their five motivating factors were, in fact, related to the
incentives framework that may be adopted to encourage volunteer
tourists to visit slum areas, even though tourists realize that these slums
are impoverished and lacking in utilities (Gray & Campbell, 2007; Zah-
ra & McIntosh, 2007).
Lo and Lee’s (2011) incentives approach attempts to address three
fundamental issues. First, Lo and Lee state that volunteer tourism in
slum destinations provides a unique experience for cultural immersion
and social interaction with local people (Binns & Nel, 2002; Brown,
2005; Caton & Santos, 2009). Secondly, they argue that today’s volun-
teer traveler seeks meaning in his/her vacations and is moving away
from the trend of having vacations just for pleasure, instead attempting
to benefit from these trips as educational opportunities. Thirdly, Lo
and Lee dispute that volunteer tours in poor areas allow tourists to es-
cape from everyday life and involve themselves in a ‘‘more primitive
society, in which the tourist can reflect on his/her identity in modern
society in comparison to the other.’’ Moreover, Lo and Lee point out
that those tourists are motivated by a desire to give back and to show
love and concern to the poor (Tosun, 2006; Urry, 1990).
One final issue to be addressed is the negative economic impact that
these tours may have on GC’s Ashwa’iyyat. The threat of economic leak-
age occurs when not all of the foreign currency earned through tour-
ism remains within the host community, unless interested local
authorities manage them properly (Ashley & Goodwin, 2007). Signifi-
cant leakage can cause negative attitudes toward slum tourism. How-
ever, leakage can be reduced by encouraging smaller scale tourism
developments, which can enable inhabitants to participate (Burns,
1999; Honey, 1999; Loon & Polakow, 2001). Likewise, visitors should
be aware of what portions of their tours’ profits go back into the com-
munity to support responsible activities (Andereck, Valentine, Knopf,
& Vogt, 2005). It is also important to ensure that the money claimed
2098 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113

to be redistributed back into the slum’s community actually is redistrib-

uted (Manyara & Jones, 2007). Consequently, it is suggested that the
appropriate form of tourism development for slums is collaborative
and responsible participation in small-scale cooperatives.
Collaborative participation means gathering small investments from
many dwellers, making it possible to raise the necessary capital for
small projects. As a result, tourism revenue remains in local hands
and is multiplied through the economy several times (Mathieson &
Wall, 1982). This allows for increased local participation as well as in-
creased local satisfaction from tourism’s benefits. So the government
of Egypt uses the cooperatives as vehicles for the attainment of upgrad-
ing and social economic development in the poorer communities
(ISDF, 2009). Typically, slum tourism cooperatives are imbued with un-
ique slum flavors such as traditional building methods, foods and hab-
its, which are incorporated into the project. Thus, slum norms and
standards may be more prevalent in small-scale cooperatives than in
large-scale developments (Lepp, 2007). Hence, it is argued that
addressing these debates and reviews is important in identifying the sig-
nificance and scope of slum tourism in GC’s Ashwa’iyyat.

Study Methods
The inherently measurable features of poverty tourism dimensions
recognized by many researchers require a quantitative method ap-
proach in order to regulate the empirical findings (Croes & Vanegas,
2008). To gain a comprehensive picture of the possible role of slum
tourism activities in enhancing dwellers’ living conditions, empirical re-
search was divided into two surveys. The quantitative method used for
the two surveys was a questionnaire examination (Creswell, 1994). The
first survey used a snowball sample of GC’s Ashwa’iyyat inhabitants to
understand their attitudes toward existing slum tourism practices,
using the approach methodology of Wearing and Lee (2008) and
adopting Noy’s (2007) sampling process. Six hundred and thirty-one
inhabitants were approached for this research. They lived in the four
types of GC’s Ashwa’iyyat and were employed in related tourism profes-
sions such as stone carving workshops, old craft shows, gift shops and
bazaars. However, their employment location was not always one of
the survey sites.
An inhabitant was considered appropriate for the sample if he/she
had had experience with tourists, tourism activities and practices and
if, through his/her work, he/she had acquired professional knowledge
of tourism effects and how they can alleviate poverty. The survey was
administrated by research representatives, who sent results to the
author to be interpreted. The first step toward identifying target inhab-
itants was to approach them within GC’s Ashwa’iyyat workshops and
small businesses. There, the relatives and students of the researcher
were introduced to individuals who acted as coordinators. These coor-
dinators then identified a number of young, well-educated inhabitants
 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113 2099

whom they considered capable of assisting in the distribution and

collection of the inhabitants’ questionnaire (henceforth IQ). The
assisting students in turn distributed IQs to GC’s dwellers and collected
them afterward. Completed IQs were handed to coordinators, who in
turn delivered them to the researcher along with their remarks.
A total of four hundred and sixty-four usable surveys were returned,
giving a highly satisfactory response rate of 73%. To achieve a 95% con-
fidence level with a ±5% sampling error (with the most conservative re-
sponse format of p = .05 and q = .05), the required sample size is 374
(Mann, 1998). In the present study, respondents numbered 464, which
corresponds to a sampling error of 4.54% instead of 5%, which is in
line with previous results of Roney and Öztin (2007). Basically, this
study represents an initial step in the development and validation of
a multifactorial measure of slum inhabitants’ attitudes toward tourism
activities, using Ogawa and Malen’s (1991) method. This measure be-
gan with a systematic review of literature on responsible tourism and
slums, which identified common perspectives of dwellers, to build
the quantitative scale (Goodwin, 2011a). Next, potential items were se-
lected from several expert sources to represent the domain of emo-
tional responses.
Items were rewritten, if necessary, for clarity and applicability, and
additional items were generated to apply to the Egyptian context. How-
ever, only items that assess economic and social impacts were included,
as these two items are relevant to the rapid improvement of current liv-
ing conditions of dwellers in the short term (McGehee, 2002). Other
items assessing physical, political, psychological and environmental im-
pacts were excluded, as these are relevant to the long-term effects
(Brohman, 1996; McGehee, 2012). The scale was then tested for con-
tent validity by pilot-testing the IQ with experienced professionals and
academics from fields of tourism planning, development research
and sustainable tourism management (Butler, 1999). Based on the
feedback, several scale items were edited or eliminated, and new ones
were added. In particular, questions with a negative wording were chan-
ged to have a positive wording, because respondents expected GC’s res-
idents to have difficulty answering negatively phrased questions.
The final IQ comprised four sections and was tested once more with
planning and development academics and experts. Only minor
changes had to be made at this stage. The IQ’s first section focused
on obtaining the socio-economic information of the participants; the
second section explored the emotional feelings of inhabitants about
the presence of tourists and tourist activities in their neighborhoods;
the third allowed respondents the opportunity to reflect on the most
positive and most negative aspects of tourism activities and practices;
and the fourth focused on obtaining information about factors that
prevent inhabitants from profiting from tourism activities. In this
study, Cronbach’s alpha (a) was computed to measure the coefficients
of the overall scale and its sub-scales, where all scales had a Cronbach’s
alpha value of 0.657 or more. According to Frey and George (2010),
this is an acceptable level in tourism research.
2100 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113

The second survey aims to identify responsible activities and prod-

ucts that could help enhance living conditions. To give a more
rounded view of these activities’ and products’ roles, randomly selected
members from a complete list of slum experts, planners and numbers
of stakeholders developed by the ISDF (2009) were invited to contrib-
ute their perspectives. These participants were included in the survey
due to their previous and current roles in GC’s slum upgrading and
development projects. They were believed to be more knowledgeable,
with a basic understanding of slum tourism issues, and able to provide
meaningful data. A total of 89 contributors met the appropriate criteria
and were willing to participate. The sample comprised planning ex-
perts (37.2%), well-educated inhabitants (bachelor’s degree holders
and above) (12.6%), local authorities’ representatives (10%), represen-
tatives of Nongovernmental Organizations (2%), tourism developers
and businessmen (11%), academics and postgraduate researchers
(19.2%) and interested slum and volunteer tourists (8%).
Furthermore, people who had been involved in a project related to
upgrading slums in GC were also considered eligible to be invited to
participate in the survey. In this stage, the survey involved two main
steps. The first aimed to select responsible products and to rate their
importance based on participants’ experiences and their professional
knowledge of both pro-poor tourism typologies and the current char-
acteristics of each of GC’s Ashwa’iyyat types. The rating was done on
the following scale: (one) signified that the product was ‘‘the most
important,’’ and (five) signified it was ‘‘the least important.’’ The sec-
ond step was intended to identify the practices of slum tourism that
could be developed by the authorities and implemented in GC’s slums.
These two steps were used to avoid errors arising from bias. Since the
used methods must have validity, multiple resources should be used to
provide reasonable results (Creswell, 1994).

GC Inhabitants’ Perceptions Toward Tourism Activities

This section details findings from the inhabitants’ investigation. A to-
tal of 464 respondents were interviewed, of whom 59.8% were male
and 40.2% female. All respondents were aged 19 or above, and a large
number of them were aged between 29 and 54 (62.9%). 1.5% of the
respondents had attained secondary or above education. 37.3% of
the respondents were working full-time, whereas the remaining
62.7% were without any full-time job. Some of the typical tourism occu-
pations were bazaar workers (34.5%), service or sales workers (19.0%),
stone-carving workers (9.0%) and craft workers (5.6%). Among those
who were working full-time, 36.2% had an annual income under
US$1000, 45.9% between $1000 and $1999 and 17.9% earned $2000
or above. This survey covered the entire four types of GC’s Ashwa’iyyat,
including respondents living at type one (22.7%), type two (31.4%),
type three (22.5%) and type four (23.4%). Of the respondents,
86.4% had been living in GC’s Ashwa’iyyat for eight years or more.
 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113 2101

Table 2 shows the mean value of GC inhabitants’ perceptions of

activities practiced around their districts. As for their responses to
the variables of sub-scale one, the statistical mean ranges from 2.6695
to 4.0625. The location of this range is between ‘‘unsupportive’’ and
‘‘supportive’’ viewpoints. Moreover, the overall mean score was
3.5555 out of 5, which means that the emotional feelings/interests of
dwellers toward current tourism activities, in general, were neither sup-
portive nor unsupportive. These results indicate a moderate degree of
involvement of GC slums’ inhabitants in relation to responsible fea-
tures of tourism (Lea, 1993). Further, no significant difference was
identified when the interest in involvement was compared to inhabit-
ants’ gender, working status or profession categories. This is perhaps
unsurprising, given that slums’ unacceptable living conditions are
the primary causes preventing the inhabitants from being involved in
tourism activities and practices (Butler, 1999).
Interestingly, when asked to identify current opportunities for casual
laborers, 378 out of 464 respondents (81.4%) indicated that tourism
job opportunities were considered a supportive tool to enhance their
living conditions. In asking participants to state their emotional re-
sponses to the economic benefits of tourism, a separate indicator for
a more precise feature of responsible activities’ interest was obtained.
Once again, a high degree of curiosity was identified (86.8%,
n = 403). As for tourism involvement when providing opportunities
for selling additional goods and services that people offer, no statisti-
cally significant difference could be found for interest in activities’ par-
ticipation when examined by gender, working status or profession
categories. These results support the hypothesis that inhabitants are
interested in responsible economic benefits of tourism activities. How-
ever, it is argued that the results are limited, in that a measurement of
those currently living in GC’s Ashwa’iyyat and working in tourism activ-
ities is not established.
These findings seem to conflict with the notion that poor and ill-
educated people living in slums have a high degree of anxiety due to
seeking to become employed in tourism activities (Goodwin, 2011a;
Wearing & Lee, 2008). In considering this, it should be kept in mind
that a large portion of respondents were poor (in terms of their level
of daily income) and ill-educated, and they are consequently under
considerable pressure to find job opportunities. Further, it should be
remembered that respondents were not asked directly about their emo-
tional feelings of anxiety in regard to becoming employed. It is there-
fore possible that no correlation exists between the two phenomena.
Simply, respondents who indicated an interest in being involved in
tourism practices and activities that take place around their quarters
may also be worried about current poor social and economic factors
that decrease their employment opportunities (Sin, 2009).
Remarkably, IQ results indicate the dwellers’ strong interest in posi-
tive impacts of tourism activities that lead to the improvement of their
poor areas’ conditions in general and of infrastructure in particular.
Yet a reported shortage of tourism activities for slums’ infrastructure
development still exists in literature (Zeng & Ryan, 2012). So it is rea-
 2102
Table 2. Inhabitants’ Perceptions toward Tourism Activities-Descriptive Analysis (n = 464)a

Variables/ Factors interpretations/dwellers 5-Point Likert Scale Factor analysis testb

factors views

M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113

4+5 3 1+2

Sub-scale How would you best describe your Very supportive/ Neutral Very SM SD % variance Loading
two emotional responses toward supportive unsupportive/ explained
tourism activities that are unsupportive
practiced around your
neighborhood as a supportive
tool to enhance your living
conditions?

f % f % f %
V1 There are no benefits yielded from 151 32.5 91 19.6 222 47.9 2.8772 1.29794 n/a .657
tourism activities.
c
V2-F8 Current activities provide 403 86.8 44 9.5 17 3.7 4.0625 .73949 5.287 .763
opportunities for selling
additional goods and services.
V3-F5c Current activities offer labor- 337 72.6 25 5.4 102 22 4.0625 1.26182 7.815 .776
intensive and small-scale
opportunities.
V4 Current activities employ a high 111 23.8 58 12.5 295 63.7 2.6695 1.21181 n/a .721
proportion of female-headed
households.
V5 The poor may gain few direct 339 73.1 101 21.8 24 5.1 3.9828 .86928 n/a .637
benefits from current activities.
V6 Many foreigners come to the 345 74.3 70 15.1 49 10.6 3.6789 .82503 n/a .509
Ashwa’iyyat wishing to
understand poverty.
Sub-scale How would you best describe the The most positive Neutral The most negative SM SD % variance Loading
three most positive and negative explained
aspects of the tourism activities
f % f % f %
that you have experienced at
your area?

V7-F7c Collecting funds from tourists for 303 65.3 39 8.4 122 26.3 3.7500 1.37000 5.992 .765
local Development projects.
V8-F6c Donating profits from tourism 138 29.8 9 1.9 317 68.3 2.8470 1.28804 6.986 .766
operations to local development
charities.
V9 Employing poor casual laborers. 378 81.4 36 7.8 50 10.8 4.3103 1.00893 n/a .739
V10 Allowing poor women a great 83 17.9 37 8 344 74.1 2.3276 1.27122 n/a .717
opportunity to be involved in
such activities.
V11 Direct participation in 433 93.3 6 1.3 25 5.4 4.7586 .76501 n/a .680
infrastructure
improvement benefiting tourists
and poor residents.
V12 Poor rights (e.g., land tenure, 46 9.9 16 3.4 402 86.7 2.2866 .93743 n/a .686
preserving traditions etc.) may
be used as tourism assets.
V13 Working with the poor highlighting 42 9 37 8 385 83 2.2241 .86782 n/a .656
voyeuristic and exploitative
aspects of tourism.
V14 Visiting less developed places like 48 10.3 10 2.2 406 87.5 2.2543 .88666 n/a .581
yours allow tourists and
foreigners to observe people
living in poverty.
V15-F3c Tour agents organizing slum tours 52 11.2 49 10.6 363 78.2 2.2069 .99256 10.414 .790
are likely to have a deal with
drug lords to ensure the safety
of wealthy tourists.
V16 Many visitors think that merely 29 6.2 76 16.4 359 77.4 2.2981 .79346 n/a .629
bearing witness to such poverty
is enough.
V17-F1c Many slum tours actively encourage 366 78.9 27 5.8 71 15.3 4.2112 1.25678 11.650 .817
tourists to help out with
preparing food and water for
some of the poorer residents.
V18 Many ‘Arab’ tourists came to slum 29 6.2 1 .2 434 93.6 2.0776 .68177 n/a .635
districts temporarily for
marriage-related purposes.
M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113

(continued on next page)

2103
 2104

Table 2 (continued)

Variables/ Factors interpretations/dwellers 5-Point Likert Scale Factor analysis testb

factors views 4+5 3 1+2

Sub-scale How would you best describe the Strongly agree/ Neutral Strongly disagree/ SM SD % variance Loading
four following factors that may agree disagree explained
prevent inhabitants from
benefiting from tourism
f % f % f %
activities?

V19 Large slums and a high population 440 94.9 9 1.9 15 3.2 4.7953 .76017 n/a .594
density may prevent the poor
from benefiting from the
positive impact of tourism
activities.
V20-F2c Slum’s remoteness hinders the 431 92.9 2 .4 31 6.7 4.7306 .83566 11.332 .807
poor from gaining from
M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113

tourism.
V21 Unsafe aspects prevent the poor 281 60.5 159 34.3 24 5.2 4.0647 1.08997 n/a .644
from benefiting from positive
impact of tourism.
V22 Feelings of shame about social 437 94.2 20 4.3 7 1.5 4.5819 .67809 n/a .741
background prevent dwellers
from participating in activities
that may alleviate poverty.
V23-F4c Dwellers rarely have faith in 397 85.6 14 3 53 11.4 4.4957 1.01818 10.081 .777
government support of
reallocating benefits of tourism
to them directly, so they do not
participate in tourism activities.
V24 Many tourists visit slums for the 403 86.9 16 3.4 45 9.7 4.2651 1.02706 n/a .611
purpose of human trafficking
(especially women and

M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113

children), therefore, the poor
tend to be afraid of
participating in tourism
activities.

Key: = (SM) = Statistical mean, (SD) Standard deviation, (f) = Frequency, (%) = Percentage, (n/a) = Not available.
a
Based upon the descriptive statistics, frequencies and dispersion test, (SPSS, V.16.0); b Extraction method: Principal component analysis, Rotation method:
Varimax with Kaiser Normalization; c F1:F8 = Factors underlying slum tourism activities as perceived by GC’s Ashwa’iyyat inhabitants.

2105
2106 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113

sonable to postulate that responsibility for tourism activities should be

reflected in a constructive upgrading manner concerning the current
status of slums’ infrastructure; this notion was explored throughout
the study. Although two quantitative surveys were used, the aim was
to provide a completeness of exploration rather than a confirmation
of validity. Interestingly, GC’s inhabitants’ perceptions indicated sev-
eral factors as obstacles to benefiting from tourism activities in terms
of infrastructure development. This suggests a high degree of validity
in regard to these concurrent themes, for example, factors related to
unsafe aspects and a lack of faith in government support (Thorne,
2011).
Regarding positive aspects of tourism, the majority of respondents
(93.3%) said that activities that help with direct participation in the
improvement of infrastructure would benefit both tourists and poor
residents (mean = 4.7586; SD = 0.76501), (see Table 2). This result
confirms previous efforts of Cattarinich (2001) and Manyara et al.
(2006), who discuss how responsible activities are characterized by
the indirect enhancement of services, which empower the poor to help
alleviate poverty features. Especially important in this respect are inclu-
sive actions that lead to poor areas’ improvements (e.g., in infrastruc-
ture, agriculture, etc.), which benefits the poor without targeting
them directly (Duarte, 2010; Manyara & Jones, 2007; Scheyvens,
2007). This can be argued as an example of what this study calls a
‘‘responsible tourism reward,’’ and it adds a further dimension to
the discussion of inhabitants’ involvement versus responsible activities,
particularly if viewed as target for potential interventions aimed at
encouraging these responsible activities.
Turning to the factors that may bar inhabitants from profiting from
activities that possibly will enhance their living conditions, the statisti-
cal mean of inhabitants’ perceptions ranged from mean = 4.0647;
SD = 1.08997 to mean = 4.7953; SD = 0.76017, which signifies that
dwellers strongly agree that all surveyed factors may prevent them from
earning from current tourism activities that are practiced around
them. More importantly, the majority of them (94.9%) found that
the large size of the slum population is the main factor contributing
to this. Remarkably, the strongest theme running through the reviewed
data sources is the influence that existing slums’ population density
has on inhabitants interested in benefiting from existing tourism activ-
ities (ISDF, 2009; Manyara & Jones, 2007). It can possibly be claimed
that variation in motivation between and within slum inhabitants
should be considered when attempting to identify priorities in select-
ing slum inhabitants for tourism job opportunities.

Factors Underlying Slum Tourism Activities as Perceived by GC’s Ashwa’iyyat

Inhabitants
This research attempts to determine possible emotional perceptions
of local community dwellers from different GC Ashwa’iyyat types toward
various tourism activities and practices by utilizing reviewed related
 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113 2107

data on slums and tourism to generate factors that could hinder slum
tourism activities from becoming more responsible (Tosun, 2006). To
investigate inhabitants’ perceptions of the variables related to tourism
activities, participants were asked to rate their degree of agreement/
disagreement on a five-point Likert scale ranging from ‘‘strongly
agree’’ (one) to ‘‘strongly disagree’’ (five) for all 24 items. A factor
analysis test, as shown in Table 2, reduced the 24 variables to eight fac-
tors with eigenvalues greater than one for each. This means that these
eight components have to remain in the analysis; to satisfy Kaiser’s cri-
terion, factors with an eigenvalue of less than one (currently repre-
sented by variables 9–24), are excluded (Kinnear & Gray, 2004).
Additionally, a factor analysis test shows that the extracted eight vari-
ables accounted for 69.55% of total variance. Table 2 shows factors in
the order of their importance in accounting with correlations between
the overall perception of tourism activities and each factor in the anal-
ysis. The most important factor, with the value of the test’s coordinate
or loading (0.817), and percent variance explained (11.650), is the fol-
lowing: ‘‘Many slum tours actively encourage tourists to help out with prepar-
ing food and water for some of the poorer residents.’’ This result indicates that
respondents have a strong degree of interest in becoming a target of
‘‘food donation tours.’’ This finding supports the hypothesis that food
donation tours act as a responsible practice for slums’ inhabitants
(Mitchell & Ashley, 2010). However, when compared to the degree
of importance (70.8%) produced by simple frequencies, it becomes
evident that obstacles to benefits from such responsible activities must
exist.
Such a view is supported by Thorne (2011), who explored the rea-
sons why food donation tours were associated with a responsible out-
put. Although Thorne’s study results are potentially biased through
inadvertent purposive sampling, Thorne’s findings are relevant. The
research concluded that the common approach to helping the poor
is to present inhabitants as grateful recipients of charity and to struc-
ture excursions to encourage food donation tours. However, tourists
should also value local peoples’ pride, dignity and ability to cope
(Wearing & Lee, 2008). Despite the difficulty in generalizing this result
beyond the sample population (n = 63), the current result indicates
that interest in food and drink celebrations as a proposed pro-poor
product is not a problem associated with inadequate involvement of
GC’s slums in such activities (measured through participating in a slum
tourism food celebration). Instead, a more specific problem exists
relating to the voyeuristic nature of such tourism activity (Manyara &
Jones, 2007; Williams, 2008).
Getting involved in such tourism activities has a negative connota-
tion, from dwellers’ viewpoints, creating a likely obstacle to respon-
dents’ own future participation in food celebrations. ‘‘Fear of
voyeurism’’ and ‘‘something to be ashamed of’’ are ethical attitudes
that were frequently cited within both surveys and in IQ data collection
as obstacles to engaging in such activities and consequently benefiting
from them, with regard to reducing poverty adversities of those dwell-
ers. Interestingly, respondents with prior experience seemed unsure of
2108 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113

developing effective local authorities’ actions in the near future that

could prevent such obstacles. However, the inhabitants’ experience
was also related to the overcoming of perceived negative aspects. In this
case, the emphasis was firmly directed to the role of local authorities
and stakeholders. This finding helps to illustrate how slum inhabitants’
experience can be perceived as benefiting the local people’s involve-
ment (Blake et al., 2008; Jiang et al., 2011; Perdue et al., 1990;
Williams, 2008).

What is the Relative Importance of Responsible Pro-Poor Products?

Speaking with slum tourism stakeholders was important, because
this presented a new and different perspective on the new trend in
question. The goal of the survey was to explore these stakeholders’
thoughts regarding (a) responsible products and (b) how to identify
practices in slum tourism. Some key findings from the conducted
descriptive statistics provide evidence that ‘‘traditional rural food &
drinks celebration’’ is the most important product for slum type
one, with 63 out of 89 respondents (70.8%) choosing it as such, giv-
ing it the highest mean value (mean = 1.9809) and the smallest
(SD = 0.4019). However, 82.0%, n = 73 indicated an interest in ‘‘ur-
ban family visits’’ as the most important product for slum type two,
although 92.1%, n = 82 indicated an interest in ‘‘traditional market
visits’’ as the most important product for slum type three. And
91.0%, n = 81 stated ‘‘volunteer tours’’ as the most important respon-
sible product for slum type four.
Remarkably, similar results were identified when respondents
were asked to indicate the relative importance of proposed prod-
ucts they would be willing to provide. This suggests a considerable
demand for responsible products in GC’s slums from stakeholders’
perspectives. Furthermore, these results suggest a degree of rela-
tionship between slum type and proposed product. This contradicts
the assertion of Goodwin (2011a) that indicated that any type of
tourism products and activities can potentially reduce poverty in
all impoverished areas. It is possible that the distinction for a par-
ticular product in a certain slum type is born from concerns of
associated planning features, particularly those relating to land
acquisition and building conditions (ISDF, 2009). Further, it can
be speculated that stakeholders could be concerned about the
way that tourism products affect poverty, in the context of its im-
pacts on a daily needs basis of the slums’ inhabitants as a whole
(Manyara & Jones, 2007).
When considering the postulate that inhabitants living in the first
type of GC’s Ashwa’iyyat already possess the land upon which they
construct their buildings (ISDF, 2009), it becomes possible to iden-
tify the most obvious poverty feature, which is limited to the need
for food and water on a daily basis. In considering this, it should
be kept in mind that the majority of inhabitants living in this slum
type are craftsmen and workers in extremely low income households
 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113 2109

(Sabry, 2009). It is therefore possible that stakeholders have a very

strong interest (mean = 1.9809, SD = 0.4019) in ‘‘food and drink cel-
ebrations’’ as a pro-poor product, which can make a significant con-
tribution to the food security of dwellers without creating
dependency (Mitchell & Ashley, 2010). Following the same way of
thinking, it can be argued that stakeholders indicate a potential link
between slum type two and ‘‘urban family visits’’ as an appropriate
product.
Significantly, results indicate a strong interest in ‘‘urban family
visits’’ as a pro-poor product (mean = 1.8022, SD = 0.4039) from
stakeholders’ perspectives. This suggests a high degree of validity in
this approach, which begins by noting that poor families with long-
leasehold contracts are often rich in culture and in connection to
their natural environment (Séjourné, 2009). Further, it highlights
that tourists wish to join such authentic family experiences, living
in this slum type. Interestingly, findings also link ‘‘market visits’’ to
slum type three and highlight a perceived association of the tradi-
tional aspects of these markets to be visited. This is crucial, as it
can be argued that when considering the claim that most inhabitants
living in slum type three, particularly, where the majority of handi-
craft workshops are situated, are laborers employed in these work-
shops (Séjourné, 2009), it becomes clear that possible economic
benefits targeted by stakeholders to support inhabitants of slum type
three can be identified.
Finally, results indicate that the most important product for type
four was ‘‘volunteer tours’’ (mean = 1.9899; SD = 0.2876). Once
again, this result is a confirmation of the need for social support
for people living in such inhuman conditions (Gray & Campbell,
2007; Jones, 2005). This is considering the fact that cemetery
slums (type four) are socially apart from the rest of GC and have
a poor image in Egyptian society (Khalifa, 2011). This study ar-
gues that an inhabitant who has to live with this burden will prob-
ably have low self-esteem and a poor self-image (Wearing, 2004).
Such a view is also supported by the research of Duarte (2010)
and McGehee (2012), who claimed that the encounter between
dwellers and tourists is based on asymmetric interactions. Conse-
quently, it is argued that if inhabitants accept tourists, it is be-
cause some of them may not be aware of the humiliation that
is taking place (Lea, 1993).

CONCLUSION
This study has provided an initial exploratory analysis of slum tour-
ism experience and practices for improving living conditions of GC’s
Ashwa’iyyat, providing further understanding of what is known from
the existing literature on the paradoxical debates about some key char-
acteristics relating to GC’s slums’ role in tourism. The study has pro-
duced new planning insights into the significance and scope of slum
tourism in GC’s Ashwa’iyyat from both inhabitants and stakeholders’
2110 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113

perspectives and some detail on responsible activities currently used to

reduce poverty features in poor areas. Based upon collected responses
from two quantitative surveys, the lesson that can be learned is that the
ethical debates concerning the introduction of tourism in informal set-
tlements should be focused on how tourism is planned and imple-
mented in slums. Arguably, it is not the presence of tourism, but
rather how it is developed, that is the central issue.
Notably, it appears that it is the way that tourism is run that
affects the inhabitants’ living conditions and optimizes (or not)
the positive side of slum tourism practices (Lea, 1993). Following
this line of thought, the remarkable idea of collaborative and
responsible participation seems to be a critical element to be
incorporated in debates about slum tourism planning or even in
discussions concerning the positive impact of tourism in poor
areas (Manyara & Jones, 2007). This paper has also investigated
the emotional responses of slums’ inhabitants who were asked
about the possible role of slum tourism practices in enhancing
their living conditions, in terms of current tourism activities that
existed around their poor areas, and whether or not responsible
tourism activities are beneficial for the alleviation of poverty in
Egyptian slums. Results from this investigation suggested a number
of further broad implications for the management and planning
of the slum tourism experience.
For instance, Egyptian authorities are invited to develop appropri-
ate products for the purpose of enhancing dwellers’ living condi-
tions. Nevertheless, the government should bear in mind that as
the idea of Ashwa’iyyat tourism is still young, it will take some time
to be able to profit from positive results of this trend. This study
suggests that slum tourism challenges the Egyptian government to
be involved and responsible enough to play a proactive planning
role in improving GC’s poor inhabitants’ living surroundings. Nota-
bly, practices such as increasing educational levels, employing crafts-
men and supporting drink and food celebrations that are inclusively
directed to the poor people of GC’s slums may allow effective and
responsible support to their living environment. Additionally, this
may be an important concern for future slum tour campaigns aim-
ing to demonstrate their ethical slum tourism issues (Blake et al.,
2008; Cattarinich, 2001; McGehee & Santos, 2005; Mitchell & Ashley,
2010).
This research was restricted to a limited fieldwork experience of
three months in four types of GC’s slums. To explore the possibility
of tourism’s being a catalyst of change and improvement in living con-
ditions, the goal was to get an emotional insight into how dwellers view
having tourism in their areas. Further research should include tourists’
motivations for visiting slums. It should also make comparisons of tour-
ists’ thoughts before and after experiencing a slum tourism activity. It
would then be possible to evaluate the change in perception after the
experience, and thus to address what is it that is prompting tourism in
GC’s slums. What impact does slum tourism have on tourists who opt
for this kind of tour? These issues clearly provide valuable topics and
 M.A. Mekawy/Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 2092–2113 2111

suggestions for future research on the debate about slum tourism in

Egypt and the world.

Acknowledgements—The author wishes to acknowledge the research coordinators, the

ISDF staff members, Eng. Amira Abou Gazia, Bristol Business School, and the communities
of Greater Cairo’ slums for their help during the field work. I also thank Prof. Renata
Tomljenović of the Institute for Tourism, Croatia and Dr. Mohamed Fawzy Afify of Menoufiya
University for commenting on the earlier draft of this manuscript.

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Submitted 20 September 2011. Resubmitted 15 November 2011. Final version 7 July 2012.
17 July 2012. Refereed anonymously. Coordinating Editor: Chaim Noy, Ph.D.
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‘We did the Slum!’ – Urban

Poverty Tourism in Historical
Perspective
a
Malte Steinbrink
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

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 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
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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: msteinbr@uos.de

ISSN 1461-6688 Print/1470-1340 Online /12/02/00213–22

C 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2012.633216
 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
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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
 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
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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).
 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
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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
 Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective 217
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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,
 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
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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.
 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,
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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
 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
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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
 Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective 221
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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
 222 M. Steinbrink
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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.
 Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective 223
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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
 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
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‘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
 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.).
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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
 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-
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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
 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
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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
 228 M. Steinbrink
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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.
 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
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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’)
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Table 1. The essential elements of slum tourism through the ages

230
Periods and places of slumming
China Town, Little Italy Township, favela, slum
East End (London: (NYC, San Francisco: (Johannesburg, Rio, Mumbai;
nineteenth century) early twentieth century) early twenty-first century)
Social contexts of Society (as a whole) Industrialization, class society, Migration/‘New World’, Globalization, world society,
emergence colonization/British Empire, modernization, Fordism post-colonialism
M. Steinbrink

denial of corporeality/prudery
Nation/region See above, urbanization, Modern America, national e.g. in South Africa:
rural–urban migration, social identity/national history, post-apartheid, transformation
reforms/welfare melting pot/assimilation,
discrimination/racism
City Urban growth, segregation/slum Internal migration and Global competition of cities,
development, epidemics/ segregation of African persistence of ethno-economic
cholera, sanitation Americans, urban migrant segregation patterns, urban
colonies growth, informality
Tourism Urban tourism (‘social/erotic voyage of urban Urban tourism as a mass International tourism in
discovery’) phenomenon developing countries as a
mass phenomenon, urban
tourism in developing
countries, urban destination
management
Mode and medium Culturalization of Culture of ‘licentiousness’ Immigrant cultures – African/Brazilian/Indian
of tourist poverty culture
construction – (‘authentic’) culture of locality
Dominant coding of moral/immoral modern/premodern global/local
the cultural
schema
Spatialization of Place of the immoral Other Place of the pre-modern – Local place in the globalized
poverty (slum as Other world
...) – Place of (cultural) distance in
the ‘global village’
Type Moral slumming Ethnic slumming Global slumming
 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
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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
 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
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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.

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