The History and Controversy of Slum Tourism 

Slum tourism takes visitors through impoverished urban areas. The industry has gained popularity in recent years, but remains controversial. 

In 2019, one of Asia’s largest slums surpassed the Taj Mahal as India’s most popular tourist attraction, according to TripAdvisor’s Travelers’ Choice Awards. Dharavi, located in the heart of Mumbai, takes up less than 1 square mile and houses over a million people. It is Asia’s second-biggest slum, and the third largest in the world. Visitors to India flock to Dharavi on slum tours organized by a number of travel companies. 

Dharavi is not the only slum that has become a major tourist destination. Slum tourism typically occurs in urban areas of developing countries. Tours take travelers through Brazil’s favelas, shantytowns in the Philippines and South Africa, and impoverished areas of Los Angeles, Detroit and Berlin. The rise in popularity of slum tourism has highlighted arguments for and against the practice, as well as questions as to who it benefits. 

Slum tourism has made headlines recently, but it is over a century old. An 1884 New York Times article describes “slumming” as “the visiting of the slums … by parties of ladies and gentlemen for sightseeing.” Slum tourism began in London, where wealthy residents traveled to the East End to observe the lives of the people there. The phenomenon spread to New York City as British tourists visited to compare the slums to those in London. “Slumming” became fashionable, and the wealthy would visit the Lower East Side to see “people of whom they had heard, but of whom they were as ignorant as if they were inhabitants of a strange country.” From New York, slum tourism traveled across the country to San Francisco and gained momentum. 

Modern slum tourism is said to have originated in South Africa. Tours in South Africa focus on townships, suburban areas with poor infrastructure and few amenities, where nonwhite workers were forced to live during apartheid. These tours began in the 1980s as opportunities to educate White government officials on the human rights violations that nonwhite residents faced, and became commercial ventures in the late 1990s after apartheid ended. 

Today, slum tours draw hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. With these visitors comes a condemnation of the slum tourism industry, which has been dubbed “poverty porn” by its critics. Opponents of slum tourism argue that slum tours are exploitative, letting wealthy visitors marvel at the less fortunate without benefiting the community. Tourists often pay hundreds of dollars for tours. Some tour companies promise that the money will be funneled back into the community but pocket it instead. There are also concerns that slum tours romanticize poverty, as many tours gloss over the reasons for the slum’s existence and ignore the plight of those who live there. 

Slum tourism’s supporters claim that tours change people’s perceptions of poverty by calling attention to the parts of tourist destinations that are often ignored and allowing visitors to get a more realistic picture. The proponents of slum tourism also argue that it can help to improve conditions. Researchers found that slum tourism in South Africa serves as a tool of urban development, allowing communities to promote the regeneration of their neighborhoods. Residents of a slum in Thailand were able to use tourism to prevent their eviction. Slum tourism promotes connectivity; tourists entering oft-avoided areas demonstrates that these areas have something to offer and should not be ignored. In Rio de Janeiro, slum tourism has opened areas to well-off visitors and locals, which allows for greater class interactions. 

Ultimately, the intentions of visitors and tour operators are the basis of slum tourism’s impact. In Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, Reality Tours and Travel employs members of the community as guides and returns 80% of profits back to the community. The tours are educational, emphasizing that Dharavi is an industrial center that contributes heavily to the economy and showing tourists Dharavi’s shops, temples and mosques as well as houses. Tours like the ones put on by Reality, where visitors gain a deeper understanding of what the area is truly like and tour operators use their revenue to better living conditions, have a generally positive outcome. 

On the other hand, tours of the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya, are notoriously harmful to the community. A study showed that tourism has not improved the conditions in Kibera and is viewed negatively by the community. Kennedy Odede, an anti-poverty activist in Kibera, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times where he says that the tourists make him feel “like a tiger in a cage.” He writes that “slum tourism is a one-way street” where residents of the slums gain nothing from the tours. Tours operated like the ones in Kibera, aimed at making money for the tour companies under the pretense of helping the community, exemplify the bad side of the slum tourism industry. 

Currently, it is up to visitors to determine whether the tour operators are socially responsible and making good on their promises to help the community, but research on slum tourism is growing. Researchers are studying how to develop best practices to promote ethical slum tourism and hope to discover ways to alleviate the inequalities that cause slums. 

Rachel Lynch

Rachel is a student at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY currently taking a semester off. She plans to study Writing and Child Development. Rachel loves to travel and is inspired by the places she’s been and everywhere she wants to go. She hopes to educate people on social justice issues and the history and culture of travel destinations through her writing.