Placing Slums in the Globalized Tourist City: a performativity and Actor-Network approach

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the role of tourist practices and performances and their capacity, real and potential, to re-signify and transform the physical, social and cultural landscape of slummed communities at urban tourist destinations. Tourism in informal urban settlements is a phenomenon studied interdisciplinarily for about 20 years and covers fieldwork in destinations around the world. The transition of slums to tourist destination has been approached from its historical roots, tourist motivations, systems of representation, economic benefits and contested moralities. This paper seeks to address the literature on slum tourism and incorporate new insights from the Performative Turn and Actor-network Theory. This shift entails changing the focus from the representations of slums within a global audience towards the doings and behavior of human and non-human actors during slum tours and how the ordering of their relations and synergies -existing and potential- represent a possibility for new spatialsocial- economic interpretations and representations of slums as urban agents.