Slum Tourism in the Americas: Commodifying Urban Poverty and Violence
Final Report Abstract
In this project we investigated slum tourism in the notorious neighbourhood of Mexico City, Tepito. We analysed the way Tepito is produced as a tourist destination and how this process affects the neighbourhood’s urban imaginary and social relations. Our main focus was on the commodification of urban poverty and violence through the tourist encounter. Understanding commodification not only as an economic but also a cultural and symbolic process we explored how the neighbourhood’s cultural and symbolic value is transformed through the tourist encounter. We placed our research between two main theoretical frames – urban development and place-making. We used tourism as a lens to explore shifts in urban development towards symbolic economy, analysing the ways lower-class residents negotiate these developments, using them for their own purposes. The place-making frame enabled us to study low-income neighbourhoods as heterogenous and interconnected places of various, negotiated meanings and identities; as well as everyday struggles and engagements with power structures. Our results include the following findings, we found that tourism in Tepito: (1) provides a platform to turn the neighbourhood’s stigma into a brand, re-signifying image, meanings and value of the neighbourhood, for the tourists and for the neighbourhood’s residents; (2) provides opportunities for identity formation and a site for people to ‘tell their own story’, which fosters a sense of pride and belonging to the neighbourhood; (3) triggers tensions in the neighbourhood as residents have different views on how their identity and “barrio culture” should be represented, sold and also by whom. The ambivalent role of tourism unmasks the on-going process of urban development; a process through which a range of actors with different economic, political and symbolic power collaborate or compete in order to transform the material and social environment according to their interests and needs. The negotiations around production of tourism highlight that urban development is not a process informed by the binary relation between the marginalized residents and the elite, but that tensions and alliances are made across various social groups and scales. The restructuring of cities under neoliberal projects is thus neither total nor totalizing but a process that is continuously negotiated by a range of actors; a process which reproduces unequal power structures but also provides space to challenge them. Moreover, as economy is always embedded in a political, social and cultural framework, urban development can be understood as a site of political struggle not only for economic resources but also for place-based meaning and identity.
Publications
- (2019) Barrio Bravo Transformed: Tourism, Cultural Politics, and Image Making in Mexico City. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 24 (2) 313–330
Vodopivec, Barbara; Dürr, Eveline
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12410) - (2020) Brokers and tours: selling urban poverty and violence in Latin America and the Caribbean. Space and culture 23 (1) 4-14
Dürr, Eveline, Rivke Jaffe and Gareth Jones
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1206331219865684) - (2020) What does poverty feel like? Urban inequality and the politics of sensation. Urban Studies 57 (5) 1015-1031
Jaffe, Rivke, Eveline Dürr, Gareth Jones, Alessandro Angelini, Alana Osbourne and Barbara Vodopivec
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0042098018820177) - (2014): Destination slum! 2, 14th–16th May 2014, Potsdam, Germany, New Developments and Perspectives in Slum Tourism Research. Sociologus – Journal for Social Anthropology, 64 (1), 97-102
Osbourne, Alana and Barbara Vodopivec
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3790/soc.64.1.97) - (2016): Garbage at Work: Ethics, Subjectivation and Resistance in Mexico. In: Robbie Duschinsky, Simone Schnall, Daniel Weiss (eds.) Purity and Danger Now: New Perspectives. London, New York: Routledge, 52-68
Dürr, Eveline and Gordon Winder
- (2016): Slum(scapes): Armut und mobile Erlebniswelten. In: Jens Kersten (Hg.): Inwastement. Bielefeld: transcript, S. 131-152.
Dürr, Eveline
(See online at https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839430507-006) - (2017): Made in Tepito: Urban Tourism and Inequality. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Vodopivec, Barbara
- (2018): Touring Trench Town: Commodifying Urban Poverty and Violence in Kingston, Jamaica. PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam
Osbourne, Alana
- Slum. Eintrag in: Oberreuter, Heinrich (Hg.) (2021): Staatslexikon. Görres-Gesellschaft zur Pflege der Wissenschaft. 8., völlig neu bearbeitete Auflage. Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, Bd. 5: Schule - Virtuelle Realität. Seite 137-139. ISBN 978-3-451-3751
Dürr, Eveline
