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Rodanthi Tzanelli, University of Leeds, UK
Negotiating sustainability: Mumbai’s tourist slumming
Although originally sustainability was inextricably linked to environmental degradation and the ‘spoliation’ of natural habitats, in more recent decades, its socio-political and cultural discourse extended to the cybersphere. The accelerated growth of urban areas is faced with a not so unexpected paradox: climate change and the destruction of environmental resources are counter-balanced by the reconstitution of utopian sociality online (Yar 2014). Indeed, the upsurge of ‘smart urbanism’ and its compliance with neo-liberal structuration (Giddens 1987; Lash & Urry 1987, 1994) has turned the nature of such socialities into a compensatory mechanism for what is slowly been eroded in real time.
My focus is the budding touristscapes (cf. Appadurai 1990) of Mumbai’s slums, which, especially after the release of Slumdog Millionaire (2008, dirs. Danny Boyle & Loveen Tandan), colluded with mediascapes beyond the film – notably, Internet business. A quintessentially Western activity, ‘slumming’ is reportedly on the rise in every major city around the world (Frenzel 2012). In Mumbai’s case, we may see in such combined tourist-media initiatives a multi-industry that operates on marketable ‘signs’ such as the nature of human communities and ecosystems, as well as their inhabitant’s corresponding lifestyles – a ‘sign industry’ (Tzanelli 2010). Of course, associations between habitats, their corresponding habitus or character (Bourdieu 1993) and the emergence of dispositif (apparatuses on which the social world is structured) should not be passed in silence. As much as this convergence highlights the role of ‘local style’ in the production of urban and rural destinations, it might become implicated in unspoken inclinations of visitors and industries to primitivism and racism. As Blanton (2011) and Jamal et.al. (2003) point out from two different perspectives (urban ecology and environmentally-geared tourism), environmental racism hides in the noblest intentions to conserve and develop. Increasingly, both industries and individuals try to dispel such confusion in their attempt to contribute to the sustainable development of disenfranchised urban areas, but regressions to racism are not altogether precluded.
E-tourism and reconfigurations of sustainability: Dharavi’s image
Mumbai’s e-tourism or digitally-facilitated slum tourism currently focuses on the city’s mega-slum, Dharavi, which featured in Slumdog Millionaire. The enterprise is not state-led for historical reasons. Indian tourism functions on a disorganised capitalist model, thus following global trends: the Indian Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC) was created as part of the Ministry of Tourism in 1966 to mark a transition in government approaches towards corporatisation. The process was followed by the launch of neo-liberal reforms in 1991 that facilitated the globalisation of the Indian tourism industr