Work

Brokers and Tours: Selling Urban Poverty and Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean

Year: 2019

Type: article

Abstract: This article explores how so-called “slum” tourism commodifies poverty and violence, transforming urban deprivation into a tourism product. In particular, we pay ethnographic attention to the role of brokers who mediate encounters between residents and tourists. The article explores how brokers—tour guides, art curators and civil society organizations—work to mediate power structures and enact a specific representational-performative politics. In so doing, brokers play a key role in aestheticizing and performing poverty and violence and converting disadvantaged spaces into a tourist product. We argue that brokers are vital to the reproduction of existing inequalities and to the formation of new social relationships and subjectivities.

Source: Space and Culture

DOI: 10.1177/1206331219865684

Authors: Eveline Dürr, Rivke Jaffe, Gareth A. Jones

Institutions: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, University of Amsterdam, London School of Economics and Political Science

Language: English

Topic: Latin American Urban Studies

Subfield: Urban Studies

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Reduced inequalities, Peace, justice, and strong institutions, No poverty, Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: green

Funders: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, Economic and Social Research Council