Slum Tourism: Poverty, Power and Ethics

Slums (including favelas, townships and other notations) have long enticed the popular imagination, considered to be places displaying a more authentic humanity, flourishing culture and deviant, but inventive entrepreneurship. Slum Tourism remains popular today and has reached mass tourism character in many cities in the global north and south. Tourism to these impoverished urban areas is however a highly controversial practice, raising issues of power and ethics as well as questions regarding potential benefits and impacts to slum communities and the organisation of tourism to deprived urban areas. This is the first edited work dealing solely and specifically with the global phenomenon slum tourism from interdisciplinary perspectives. Building on research by prolific researchers the book contributes a comprehensive and unique overview of current empirical, practical and theoretical knowledge on the subject. It takes a thorough and critical review of the controversial issues of power and ethics associated with slum tourism, asking whether slums should be visited, how they are represented, why they are visited and who is benefiting from it? It further situates slum tourism in the context of current issues in tourism to offer further knowledge of tourism'¬"s role in poverty alleviation and urban regeneration, power relations in contact zones and tourism'¬"s cultural and political implications. Drawing on research from a range of geographical regions and multidisciplinary perspectives this ground breaking volume will be valuable reading for students, researchers and academics interested in this contemporary form of tourism.