Since the start of the year, tourists are able to ‘fully’ experience the reality of everyday life for the more than one million people living in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum. For £22 visitors can stay at a resident’s house for one night, while sharing a public toilet with 50 other families. The house comes equipped with a flat screen TV and air conditioner, quite the distorted picture compared to that of families living in 10m2 cardboard ‘buildings’ alongside excrement-filled streets.
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Advertising slum tours as the alternative tourist route to get the real picture of a socially unequal place is misleading. A study by the University of Pennsylvania concluded that what drives most people to book a trip around the Dharavi slum is curiosity rather than education. Poverty is thus turned into a source of entertainment, something that can be experienced but soon escaped from.
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Slumming isn’t, however, a recent trend. It started in Victorian London when the upper class travelled to the East End to see how the other half lived.
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Today it takes history back to the colonial era. Rich foreigners travel to the underdeveloped world to stare at the normal lives of impoverished communities. Locals are almost regarded as an unknown species, and invasive photography undermines basic rights like privacy and dignity.
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Slum Tourism or Poverty-Porn?
By Daniela Costa
Tourism is regarded as the main source of foreign exchange and a viable economic resource for many developing countries. Slum tourism is frequently described as a social awareness promoter, but the truth is far from that.
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There is still no mechanism to determine the amount of proceeds that are injected into the community or if the profit is evenly divided. Indeed, a study by Akdeniz University, which used Nairobi slums as its case study, found that most of the money from tours goes to non-residents. There is still no certification agency in place to discern exploitative tour operators from the ones supported by locals and socially responsible.
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Making profit out of poverty is the pinnacle of cynicism. Privileged people paying to witness others’ misery surely isn’t the way to eradicate inequality.
What drives most people to book a trip around the Dharavi slum is curiosity rather than education
Although slum tourism is frequently described as a social areness promoter, there are very few proceeds being injected int othe regeneration of such societies
Ph. Matt-80
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