An article in The Age, 'For Richer, For Poorer', looks at the pros and cons of 'slum tourism'.
I'd never heard of this term before reading the article, but it's meaning is obvious. The context: a three-hour tour of Rocinha favela, one of many shanty towns that cling to hillsides in Rio de Janeiro. One of the aims of the tour is "to show that most residents are ordinary people, not drug lords - yet evidence of the local gang, ADA, is spray-painted on many walls and our guide, very discreetly, points out armed sentries keeping watch for police at the favela's entry points." Similar tours now run in India and South Africa. In Mumbai, they go to Dharavi, Asia's biggest slum, and in Johannesburg to the township of Soweto, where the Oscar-winning film Totsi was set.
Critics of slum tourism - which, due to the derogatory notions of 'slum', I'm going to re-dub 'informal settlement tourism' (!!) - say that it's exploitative, voyeuristic and an invasion of privacy. I would agree with this...touring underprivileged settlements IS starkly different to touring wealthy settlements, for the simple reason that the underprivileged rarely have the luxury of privacy within their communities, let alone their own homes. They can't build big walls, they don't have private bathrooms, couples don't have private bedrooms...they don't have the resources to choose to "hide" themselves (and yes, I acknowledge that privacy may be valued differently in different cultures).
On the other hand, these tours are also praised for raising awareness of poverty and bringing tourism dollars to communities in need. I can acknowledge the former - so many tourists to places like Vanuatu or Thailand are either completely unaware of, or have very little idea about, the poverty that they are actually benefiting from. I've seen white American uni students berate tuk-tuk drivers and complain that Thailand is "too expensive", completely forgetting that the tuk-tuk driver is probably struggling to make a living while they, the "poor" American university student, are enjoying the luxury of international travel. I would, however, be careful of jumping to the conclusion that the presence of tourists in a particular geographical area necessarily means that the local population is benefitting - this applies as much to the "slums" of Rio de Janeiro as it does to the hill tribes of Thailand.
