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: to visit slums especially out of curiosity. broadly : to go somewhere or do something that might be considered beneath one's station sometimes used with it. slumming it in budget hotels. slummer noun. Examples of slum in a Sentence. Noun He grew up in the slums of New York. Verb He sometimes likes to go slumming in bars around the city.
- Overview
- Slumming For Centuries
- Presenting Poverty
- No Two Cities Alike
- All About Intention
People have toured the world’s most marginalized, impoverished districts for over a century.
A scene from the Baseco neighborhood of Tondo–the largest district in Manila and one of the most densely-populated places on the planet.
Hundreds of shanty towns line the riverbanks, train tracks, and garbage dumps in the Filipino capital—the most jammed-packed areas in one of the world’s most densely populated cities. Around a quarter of its 12 million people are considered “informal settlers.”
Manila is starkly representative of a global problem. According to the United Nations, about a quarter of the world’s urban population lives in slums—and this figure is rising fast.
Rich cultural heritage brings visitors to Manila, but some feel compelled to leave the safety of the historic center sites to get a glimpse of the city’s inequality. Tour operators in the Philippines—as well as places like Brazil and India—have responded by offering “slum tours” that take outsiders through their most impoverished, marginalized districts.
Slum tourism sparks considerable debate around an uncomfortable moral dilemma. No matter what you call it—slum tours, reality tours, adventure tourism, poverty tourism—many consider the practice little more than slack-jawed privileged people gawking at those less fortunate. Others argue they raise awareness and provide numerous examples of giving back to the local communities. Should tourists simply keep their eyes shut?
Slum tourism is not a new phenomenon, although much has changed since its beginning. “Slumming” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1860s, meaning “to go into, or frequent, slums for discreditable purposes; to saunter about, with a suspicion, perhaps, of immoral pursuits.” In September 1884, the New York Times published an article about the latest trend in leisure activities that arrived from across the pond, “‘Slumming’ will become a form of fashionable dissipation this winter among our Belles, as our foreign cousins will always be ready to lead the way.”
Usually under the pretense of charity and sometimes with a police escort, rich Londoners began braving the city’s ill-reputed East End beginning around 1840. This new form of amusement arrived to New York City from wealthy British tourists eager to compare slums abroad to those back home. Spreading across the coast to San Francisco, the practice creeped into city guide books. Groups wandered through neighborhoods like the Bowery or Five Points in New York to peer into brothels, saloons, and opium dens.
Visitors could hardly believe their eyes, and justifiably so. “I don’t think an opium den would have welcomed, or allowed access to, slummers to come through if they weren’t there to smoke themselves,” Chad Heap writes in his book Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940. Recognizing the business opportunity, outsiders cashed in on the curiosity by hiring actors to play the part of addicts or gang members to stage shoot-’em-ups in the streets. After all, no one wanted the slum tourists to demand a refund or go home disappointed.
Children play in the Baseco neighborhood of Tondo.
Photographs by Hannah Reyes Morales
The city of San Francisco eventually banned such mockery of the poor, the New York Times reported in 1909: “This is a heavy blow to Chinatown guides, who have collected a fee of two dollars each. The opium smokers, gamblers, blind paupers, singing children, and other curiosities were all hired.”
Plastic arrives from all over India to the dark alleys and corrugated shacks of Dharavi in Mumbai—the second-largest slum on the continent of Asia (after Orangi Town in Pakistan) and third-largest slum in the world. Ushered around by the company Reality Tour and Travel, tourists see a thriving recycling industry which employs around ten thousand to melt, reshape, and mould discarded plastic. They stop to watch the dhobiwallahs, or washermen, scrub sheets from the city’s hospitals and hotels in an open-air laundry area.
In a TripAdvisor review, one recent participant from Virginia appreciated the focus on community. “It was great to hear about the economy, education and livelihood of the residents,” she writes. “The tour group doesn't allow photography or shopping which I think is really important. It didn't feel exploitative, it felt educational.”
One traveler from London commented on the extremity of the scene. "Had to stop after about 20 minutes into it due to the overbearing nature of the surroundings. The tour is not for the faint hearted. I would've liked a few more disclaimers on the website to warn us about the nature of it." Another guest from the United Kingdom expressed disappointment over the so-called family meal. “This was in the home of one of the guides and, whilst his mum made lunch a delicious meal that we ate in her house, she didn’t eat with us so it wasn’t really what I had expected from a family lunch (or the photos promoting such on the website).”
Thosands live among the dead with tombs as beds, prefering the quiet to the crowds of the sprawling shanty towns around the city.
Photographs by Hannah Reyes Morales
Reality Tours hopes to challenge the stereotypical perception of slums as despairing places inhabited by hopeless people. The tour presented slum residents as productive and hardworking, but also content and happy. Analyzing more than 230 reviews of Reality Tour and Travel in her study, Dr. Melissa Nisbett of King’s College London realized that for many Dharavi visitors, poverty was practically invisible. “As the reviews show, poverty was ignored, denied, overlooked and romanticized, but moreover, it was depoliticized.” Without discussing the reason the slum existed, the tour decontextualized the plight of the poor and seemed only to empower the wrong people–the privileged, western, middle class visitors.
The main question should be: Is poverty the central reason to visit?
Other cities take different approaches to slum tourism. In the early 1990s, when black South Africans began offering tours of their townships—the marginalized, racially-segregated areas where they were forced to live—to help raise global awareness of rampant human rights violations. Rather than exploitation inflicted by outsiders, local communities embraced slum tourism as a vehicle to take matters of their traditionally neglected neighborhoods into their own hands.
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Some free tours of favelas in Rio de Janeiro provided an accessible option to the crowds that infiltrated the city during the World Cup and Summer Olympics, while most companies continue to charge. Tour manager Eduardo Marques of Brazilian Expeditions explains how their authenticity stands out, “We work with some local guides or freelancers, and during the tour we stop in local small business plus [offer] capoeira presentations that [support] the locals in the favela. We do not hide any info from our visitors. The real life is presented to the visitors.”
Despite sincere attempts by tour operators to mitigate offense and give back to locals, the impact of slum tourism stays isolated. Ghettoized communities remain woven into the fabric of major cities around the world, each with their individual political, historical, and economic concerns that cannot be generalized. Similarly, the motivations behind the tourism inside them are as diverse as the tour participants themselves. For all participants involved, operators or guests, individual intentions matter most.
Better connections between cities allow more people to travel than ever before, with numbers of international tourists growing quickly every year. While prosperity and quality of life have increased in many cities, so has inequality. As travelers increasingly seek unique experiences that promise authentic experiences in previously off-limits places, access through tours helps put some areas on the map.
Travel connects people that would otherwise not meet, then provides potential to share meaningful stories with others back home. Dr. Fabian Frenzel, who studies tourism of urban poverty at the University of Leicester, points out that one of the key disadvantages of poverty is a lack of recognition and voice. “If you want to tell a story, you need an audience, and tourism provides that audience.” Frenzel argues that even taking the most commodifying tour is better than ignoring that inequality completely.
For the long-term future of these communities, the complex economic, legal, and political issues must be addressed holistically by reorganizing the distribution of resources. While illuminating the issue on a small scale, slum tourism is not a sufficient answer to a growing global problem.
- Christine Bednarz
Nov 21, 2019 · The practice of slumming was first observed among philanthropists, journalists and clergymen like William Booth, founder of The Salvation Army, who would visit the slums on social expeditions that were wrapped in a cloak of concern, welfare and charity.
Jul 6, 2009 · Slumming, or a form of it, made a brief comeback during the 1980s and 1990s in the states. And there is still a modern equivalent of that voyeurism as people pay to take tours of slums in India,...
We welcome feedback: report an example sentence to the Collins team. Read more…. She'd scrape the paint off and sell the canvas down Bayswater to slumming toffs. They do most of their playing at the club, but sometimes they feel like slumming and hit the joints.
What does the noun slumming mean? There are five meanings listed in OED's entry for the noun slumming , two of which are labelled obsolete. See ‘Meaning & use’ for definitions, usage, and quotation evidence.
A heavily populated urban area characterized by substandard housing and squalor: grew up in a slum near downtown; lived in the slums by the river. intr.v. slummed, slum·ming, slums. To visit impoverished areas or squalid locales, especially out of curiosity or for amusement. Idiom: slum it.
