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Aug 24, 20205 min read

How does slum tourism affect local communities?

By: Annika Hesse


Some of the wealthiest cities in the world are, ironically, surrounded by communities consisting of extremely impoverished people residing in jam-packed, feeble housing units with a lack of basic sanitation services. These urban residential areas are often referred to as slums. The issue is that rather than becoming an area of concern, cities have turned slums into a tourist attraction, making money off of these people’s suffering. In fact, the slum-like areas in already popular destinations such as Mumbai, Manila, and Rio de Janeiro have become yet another attraction for wealthy vacationers. Local agents take advantage of vacationers' curiosity and offer tours of the most marginalized areas of the city.


This branch of tourism has brought up many moral and ethical dilemmas regarding tourists’ motivations and responses to what they witness. Some people argue that privileged people take tours solely to gawk at the less fortunate, while others argue that the tours raise awareness and funds for people living in the slums. However, the most important way to determine whether or not these tours are ethical or not is through examining the effects of these tours on local communities.

When did slum-tourism start?


Slum tourism has been around since the mid-1800s when middle and upper-class Londoners would participate in day trips to the East End, an area of London notorious for its extreme poverty. This activity became so popular that the colloquial term, “slumming”, meaning “to go into, or frequent slums for discreditable purposes” was added to the Oxford English Library in the 1860s. “Slumming” made its way to New York City as tourists from London were eager to visit foreign slums to compare them to their“own” domestic ones. Fabian Frenzel, a professor at the University of Leicester who studies urban tourism of poverty, says that the introduction of photography also helped increase interest in the slums of major cities. People would see pictures of this totally different lifestyle and want to see it for themselves.


This form of entertainment started to dwindle after World War 2 due to the implementation of social welfare and housing. However, South African citizens reintroduced the practice in South Africa during the 1990s as a way to bring global attention to domestic human rights infractions. Ironically, the South African regime offered tours as an official tourist attraction. It wasn’t long before slum tours started being offered as tourist attractions in other impoverished areas around the world. With the help of increasing media coverage of slums in documentaries and movies, the industry of slum-tourism continued to grow. “Slumdog Millionaire” in particular, has been accredited with the increase of visitors to the Mumbai Dharavi slum in India.


So how do these tours directly affect the people living in the slums?


First, let’s consider how the people residing in slums react to the masses of people coming to their neighborhoods. Surprisingly, they are more confused than outraged. According to a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania, the tourists are met with a tone of “ambivalence” from the locals. Frenzel stated that he was once asked by a local, “Why are you here? This is not the Gate of India.” They don’t understand why tourists would rather visit their abodes than the more pleasant areas of the city. Of course, there are few instances where the tours are met with hostility, but that usually occurs when travelers are being disruptive. As for financial compensation, the majority of touring companies often advertise that part of the money spent to go on the tour is returned to the community. However, there is no official monitoring of smaller operators, so it is impossible to determine how much money is actually fed back into the community. Harold Goodwin, a professor at the International Centre for Responsible Tourism, says that if companies claim they are giving money to projects to help the slums “you should expect to see that project and be very suspicious if somebody says they're putting back a portion of the profit”. Additionally, local guides that live in the slums are often underpaid and exploited for their part in the tours. In fact, guides depend mainly on tips and have been found to discourage donations to locals in hopes of receiving more money themselves. Some companies, though, actually do feed a substantial amount of money back into the community. For example, Reality Tours and Travel, a company based in Mumbai, India that offers tours of the Dharavi slum, actually pumps 80% of its proceeds into community projects they have set up throughout the slums.


What are the impacts of slum-tourism?


While looking at the larger impacts of slum-tourism on local communities, we see that they can be both negative and positive. The founders of Reality Tours and Travel have said that they want to offer tourists a real look into the slums and an opportunity to meet the hard-working, diverse people who appear content with their living situations. However, Dr. Melissa Nisbett of King’s College points out that this approach to slum tours actually romanticizes poverty, and in doing so, decontextualizes the hardships of the people living in the slums. This only serves to make tourists feel better about themselves and enable their ignorance of the horrible circumstances these people must endure. There are some people that go on these tours with positive intentions and are interested in meaningful interactions, but the majority of visitors are there for the photo-op and the story. The touring of these neighborhoods as if they were zoos can also unintentionally dehumanize the people living there. Moreover, by publicizing the slums, the entire country may be roped in and painted as run-down and undeveloped, tarnishing their image in the media. However, this in turn puts pressure on the country’s governments to improve living conditions within the slums which brings us to the positive impacts of slum tourism.


The largest positive impact of slum tourism in local communities is described best by Frenzel: an opportunity for the promotion of the most isolated areas in cities. He says that this can help forge connections between communities by reducing the assumptions that these areas are no-go zones. And although the money the community receives from the majority of tour companies is minimal, it is better than nothing. The money that trickles down to them in addition to increased attention from tourists can help promote the small businesses lining the streets of the slums.


The ethical problems associated with this branch of tourism are undeniable, but Frenzel points out that the biggest problem with poverty is the lack of awareness. The truth is that roughly a quarter of the world’s urban population lives in slums and the majority of the developed world is completely oblivious. When people from more developed parts of the world embark on these journeys to slums, they see things that they had never even known existed and acknowledge the inequality between the lives of locals and their own. However, while these slum tours are able to highlight the issue of poverty on a small-scale, they are not long term solutions to an increasingly pressing issue. We can only hope that these tours are a start to pressuring countries to holistically address the political and economic issues that enable these sad examples of extreme inequality to exist.


Discussion Questions:

  • What should the international community do to hold local governments accountable for the living circumstances in slums?

  • Should there be regulations for companies giving slum tours requiring them to give the majority of their profits back to communities?

  • How can tourists support local communities when they visit?

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