Lost among sweaty pictures of the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square, a Beijing of a past era still exists somewhere on my computer’s hard disk. At the naïve age of 12 years, my visit to China was about documenting what I saw rather than understanding it, taking photographs of people rather than connecting with them.
As such, my first encounter with urban poverty too was through the lens of a camera in a Beijing slum. My aunt, who had studied in the city and so knew the “real China,” was our tour guide. I remember how one storeowner threw onion skins at me when he saw I tried taking a picture of him. The terror was only momentary; the longer-lasting regret in my young mind was that I had missed a photo of the man throwing onions at me. From the perspective of a more aware “me” eight years later, the situation is an uncomfortable jumble of the “gaze” and the subject-object relationship.
Today, slum tourism is a formidable sub-industry, with its services especially concentrated in India, the townships of South Africa, and the favelas of Brazil. If monetized effectively for communities, slum tourism has great potential to benefit both tourists and locals. How can tour companies build structure-disrupting business designs that can bring about real change to these slums? How do community voices stay alive in the face of commercialization? As companies wade through the murky waters of morality and ethics, questions seem to articulate themselves quicker than answers.
Eyebrows Raised
Slum tourism is not a new phenomenon. It started with the industrialization and urbanization of 19th century London, when the upper classes developed a curiosity about the lifestyle of the newly emerging lower classes. Slum tourism as a business concept subsided for a long period of time until Rio de Janeiro’s 1992 Earth Summit, during which the city’s slums became popular tour destinations for the attendees. From there, it proliferated globally to countries such as India and South Africa, taking on a life of its own to become a formidable and lucrative sub-industry.
Implicit in the “worldliness” associated with travel also lies a bias towards seeing the unfamiliar, the “exotic.” According to John Lancaster, a freelance journalist who wrote an award-winning article on Indian slum tourism for Smithsonian, this exoticization isn’t necessarily malicious. “Tourists want to see these places as they are in their authentic forms and they don’t want to stay in five-star hotels … I don’t think anyone does it because they take pleasure in other people’s poverty.”
If the intentions are indeed pure, the situational power dynamic keeps the eyebrows raised. While tourists, backpackers and luxury travelers alike, can whiz through these slums in the backs of motorcycles, on buses, or on two-hour walking trips, poverty itself has no mobility. Eveline Duerr, an anthropologist at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, told the HPR that this difference in mobility has implications that stretch beyond inequalities in physical agency. “Mobility is often tied to knowledge—you get access to other knowledge systems that you wouldn’t otherwise, and you’re able to access networks with mobility. It’s a question of privilege, power, resources, and prestige.”
Who Bears the Burden?
Chris Way, a Londoner inspired by the favela tour he took in Brazil, founded Reality Tours & Travel in 2005. The company describes itself as a “social tour operator” based in Dharavi, a slum town in Mumbai, India. According to Way, 80 percent of tour profit goes towards his company’s sister non-profit, Reality Gives, which provides “various educational and other activities that benefit the slums that we visit.” Last year, Reality reported a net income of approximately $250,000 and saw approximately a 20 percent growth in the number of packages purchased per year.
Like Reality, other slum tour operators have built in “social impact” funds that try to massage the awkward inequalities in power. SlumGods Tours and Travel, another Dharavi-based company, dedicates 30 to 40 percent of its profit to a center that it established to teach dance to local children. Sunil Rayana, its founder, told the HPR, “whenever children came to the dance practice, some didn’t have shoes. So we distributed shoes to every single pair of feet in the group.” In slum tourism, doing business means much more than making profits.
Slum tourism is about transforming the physical mobility of the tourist into economic and social mobility for the slum dwellers. Whether in the form of shoes that open up a whole world of expressive movement or a pre-school that provides the basic foundation for education, the idea is that the profits of slum tourism bring both mobility and, possibly in the very long run, mobilization, especially as the poor begin to think politically and economically about their living situations.
This transference of mobility might also be more literal, as Duerr tells us. “Although it’s a bit of a tricky issue because it’s often done without their knowledge, pictures of these slums and their people are posted everywhere. Far more people are aware of poverty because of the increased mobility of slum dwellers via social media. I think this is something that can in fact be empowering.” Although Reality prohibits the use of cameras on its tours, the stories and oral images that travel around the world deliver a virtual mobility to the observed, raising foreign awareness around issues of global poverty and inequality. The irony lies in the fact that this newfound mobility is accompanied by an equal loss in agency, as the slum dwellers’ photos and stories are spread without their knowledge.
Bandages Without Ointment
If the social impact-oriented intentions of slum tour operators assuage the worries of critics at all, the challenge that remains unmet is delivery on these ideals. Are the good social motives of these companies enough to bring about real change? Or are they just a sticker for hiding the ethical discomforts of slum tourism? Many of the tour company leaders that the HPR interviewed, such as Rayana, displayed a rather simplistic and complacent understanding of their impact on the locals: “What is happening is that whoever is coming for the tour is generating a lot of revenue and the money stays in the slum. The money stays in Dharavi,” he said.
But where exactly is the money spent? How do companies ensure that they provide the financial transparency that they owe the slum dwellers? At both Reality and SlumGods, the social good portion of the money is spent on what leaders of both companies described to the HPR simply as “various activities.” And while Reality is a more established organization linked to an NGO, SlumGods still has not acquired a license for operating as a non-profit, which has prevented them from accepting formal donations. This has effectively allowed the company to decide how much of the revenue to put back into the community—with the lights turned off.
In a system that brings about slum dwellers’ increased dependence on one-time direct donations of a few dollars, the plan for change remains unclear. Compared to their counterparts in academia, tour operators might not even be conscious of this problem at all. Duerr told the HPR: “There are different interests between operators and academics. Academics are more interested in the social and cultural phenomenon behind this and less in the question of net benefit. I’m sure that in the short term, there are of course people who always benefit. But does it really alleviate poverty at a structural level? I’m inclined to say no.” Without a structurally profound understanding of how poverty prolongs itself, the tour operators’ mere good intentions may not translate into effective action.
Clouding the Water
Diverting tourist money away from slum dwellers is another recent trend in some slum tour companies’ business strategy. Jeanett Andrea Soderstrom, a writer about responsible tourism, found in her Cape Town research “a very sad reality of increased competition between local guides.” Tourists are now likely to give more money directly to slum dwellers, rather than to the company. In response, many companies tell tourists to wait until the end of the tour to show any kind of monetary generosity.
In Langa, an oft-visited slum town in Cape Town, a mysterious donation box sits in the pre-school, placed there by a local tour company. Even the director of the school does not know who fills and empties its contents. “The pre-school itself is one beautiful success story. But the donation box in there is a point of concern. There’s this mystery around it, a lack of transparency,” Soderstrom told the HPR.
And while the question of community approval was shaky to begin with, even for relatively recognized and established companies like Reality, the issue of direct donations makes the picture even more complex. Many of these families know that they are being “exploited” by the slum tour operators in their towns. But they return, time and time again, to the helpless decision of continuing to participate in the tour itineraries, all for the small potential of “earning something as opposed to nothing.” At the end of the day, does heightened mobility matter so much if someone else is holding the key? In an industry that depends almost wholly on the tour companies’ honesty and transparency, the promise to change the status quo might be feeble at best.
Tour operators have taken an important first step towards becoming “social good” ventures. Whether or not these goals will actually be achieved is still an open question. For one, operators should reflect and deliberate even harder, perhaps with the input of sociologists and international NGOs, on ways to make their impact structurally penetrating rather than decoratively helpful. They should open up and continue conversations with the community on how they can better meet its needs. All of this is necessary to ensure that slum dwellers like the one that I met in Beijing have not only onions, but also the agency and power to throw them and say “no.”
Image credit: Sephi Bergerson