Empowering the empowered? Slum tourism and the depoliticization of poverty

- Ethnographic and online analyses of a slum tour.
- Slum tour depoliticizes poverty.
- Slum tour empowers white, wealthy westerners, rather than slum residents.
- Synthesizes data on slum tourism with a debate on the depoliticization of poverty.

Mumbai's Dharavi slum occupies a plot half the size of Central Park. It is home to one million people, with almost half of residents living in spaces under 10 m2, making it over six times as dense as daytime Manhattan. Using ethnographic fieldwork and online analysis, this article examines slum tourism and the perceptions and experiences of western visitors. Local tour operators emphasize the productivity of the slum, with its annual turnover of $665 million generated from its hutment industries. Its poor sanitation, lack of clean water, squalid conditions and overcrowding are ignored and replaced by a vision of resourcefulness, hard work and diligence. This presentation of the slum as a hive of industry is so successful that visitors overlook, or even deny, its obvious poverty. Dharavi is instead perceived as a manufacturing hub and retail experience; and in some cases even romanticized as a model of contentment and neighbourliness, with western visitors transformed by 'life-changing', 'eye-opening' and 'mind-blowing' experiences. This article concludes that the potential of slum tours as a form of international development is limited, as they enable wealthy middle-class westerners to feel 'inspired', 'uplifted' and 'enriched', but with little understanding of the need for change.