Malte Steinbrink

Festivalisation and urban renewal in the Global South: socio-spatial consequences of the 2010 FIFA World Cup

Sports mega events increasingly take place in the metropolises of emerging economies. As a city-marketing tool, these events are said to make the host cities more visible in the international competition for foreign and domestic investments. Infrastructural upgrades and fast tracking of urban development projects, as well as giving focus and legitimation to urban policy makers, are supposedly the further benefits of hosting mega events. This recalls the ‘Festivalisation of Urban Policy’ hypothesis by Häußermann and Siebel, which describes the instrumentalisation of large-scale cultural and sports events to support image building and to catalyse urban development in European and US cities. Given that socio-economically very heterogeneous nations increasingly host these events, it is necessary to extend the debate and to investigate whether the political, economic and social effects in these countries of the Global South – conventionally labelled as the developing world – can be explained with the festivalisation hypothesis: Are the urban development effects qualitatively comparable and, if so, are they more strongly or weakly pronounced than in the Global North? The 2010 International Federation of Football Association World Cup in South Africa is a fitting example to explore the characteristics and dynamics of mega events in the host cities of the Global South.

'We did the slum!' - urban poverty tourism in historical perspective.

Abstract Slum tourism in the Global South is a relatively new phenomenon. The tourist gaze at the poverty of the Others is long established, though. This paper is concerned with the genesis of urban poverty tourism. By placing the phenomenon of slumming in the wider realm of the social upheavals in Victorian London and early twentieth century USA, the historical review first explains its dependency on the social context determining its emergence and evolution. Secondly, slum tourism is shown to be adequately understood only if seen as part of modern city tourism. Thirdly, it is demonstrate that the culturalization of poverty attains special significance in slum tourism. Fourthly, the history of slum tourism is shown to have implications for understanding present-day slum tourism in the Global South, using South Africa as an example. The article is designed to be a first step towards understanding the conditions, forms and consequences of globalization of slum tourism and the process of constructing the global slum as a universal type of tourist destination.

Slum tourism: state of the art.

This article provides a view on the state-of-the-art literature on slum tourism. It points to the rapid growth of slum tourism research in recent years and highlights the main avenues that research has thus far explored in areas such as slum tourism history, slum tourist subjectivity, resident perspectives, slum tourism operations, economics, and mobilities. With the advent of slum tourism the relationship of poverty and tourism has changed. Tourism is no longer only a means to fight poverty, but poverty is an attraction of tourism. This has consequences for the relationship of slum tourism to other forms of tourism where poverty functions as an attraction, like volunteer or developmental tourism. The article identifies research gaps as well as avenues for further research.