The role of spatial organization in Resurrection City and other protest camps

Social and political organizing and organization has a spatial dimension, and there is increasing interest in academic studies of organization to understand better how space and organization relate, interact, and conflict. There is a range of studies that look at business and workplace organization, but little evidence from social movement organization or what is sometimes referred to as alternative organization studies. This article addresses this gap by observing and analyzing the effects of spatial organization in social movements. It focuses particularly on protest camps, a form of social movement organization in which spatial organization is particularly important. It looks at the Resurrection City protest camp of 1968 to identify the development of spatial organization practices. They are carried onwards across social movements, as they resolve organizational desires for the social movement organization, such as enabling mass organization without resorting to formal membership or hierarchical structures. In summary, the article provides insight into the relationship between spatial and social organization

Tourist agency as valorisation: Making Dharavi into a tourist attraction

Tourist agency is an area of renewed interest in tourism studies. Reflecting on existing scholarship the paper identifies, develops and critically examines three main approaches to tourism agency, namely the Service-dominant logic, the performative turn, and tourist valorisation. Tourist valorisation is proposed as a useful approach to theorise the role of tourists in the making of destinations and more broadly to conceptualise the intentions, modalities and outcomes of tourist agency. The paper contributes to the structuring of current scholarship on tourist agency. Empirically it addresses a knowledge gap concerning the role of tourists in the development of Dharavi, Mumbai into a tourist destination

Slum Tourism and Urban Regeneration: Touring Inner Johannesburg

Much attention has been paid to township tourism in South Africa, a practice of tourism that emerged in Apartheid South Africa with different organised tours catering for governmental officials, faith-based groups and anti-apartheid activists. In democratic South Africa, township tourism has developed into a mainstream tourism activity, and operators now offer township tours, township stays and other tourist activities in townships across rural and urban South Africa. Township tourism has also been one central empirical pillar of the relatively new research area of slum tourism, addressing tourism in slums and areas of relative urban poverty across the globe. Based on recent preliminary empirical research in Johannesburg, this paper shows that slum tourism can now also be observed in areas other than townships in South Africa, including perceived ‘no-go areas’ in inner-city Johannesburg. The expansion of slum tourism beyond townships in Johannesburg points to an increasingly complex picture of urban poverty in South Africa. It also allows reflections on the role of slum tourism in poverty alleviation and urban regeneration, responding to and addressing ‘territorial stigma’ and other related symbolic aspects of poverty. Analysing the motivations and perspectives of tour operators of some of these new tours, the paper finds that the new slum tourism in South Africa is pursued in order to serve as an urban development and regeneration tool from below. It responds to an absence of action or perceived failure to respond to poverty by urban policy, and its potential lies in particular in addressing invisibility, overcoming territorial stigma and empowerment of the urban poor

Exit the system? Anarchist organization in the British climate camps

Protest camps have proliferated in social movement practice globally in recent years. Research has started to address protest camps and this study aims to contribute to the emerging field, focusing in particular on their form of organization. Protest camps appear to resonate with social movement activists because they combine characteristics of networks like fluidity and flexibility with certain elements of organization, in particular the ability to create and pursue an alternative order. They do so, I argue, by pursuing organization in space. In this way protest camps offer practical solutions to the question of how to achieve powerful challenges to the status quo while maintaining a prefigurative politics of social change. In particular elements of organization like hierarchy, membership and rules are significantly altered when organization is pursued in space. I argue that the history of the protest camp as an organisational form is best conceived as a series of experiments with alternative, anarchist organization, where different innovative elements of organisation are invented, modified and adapted to locally specific needs. Two distinct forms of spatial organisation emerge across different camps, the creation of spatial antagonism and decentralisation. Pursing spatial antagonism and decentralisation protest camps enable ‘partial organization’, somewhere between network structures and full organization. Empirically I discuss the camp for climate action (CFCA). From 2006 to 2010 it made headlines news in the UK and beyond. The analysis of the development of CFCA from previous camps indicates the importance of the spatial antagonism to protest camp organization. If it diminishes, elements of organization like hierarchy, rules, bureaucracy became more visible, a factor that can be understood as contributing to the discontinuation of climate camps in the UK in 2011

Slum tourism in the context of the tourism and poverty (relief) debate

The paper examines the role of slum tourism in poverty relief. To do so, it surveys the state-of-the-art literature on tourism and poverty and investigates the ways in which slum tourism research relates to this literature. Slum tourism research has addressed the question of how the poor may benefit from this practice; however, these efforts have not systematically considered the general debate on tourism and poverty relief. The survey of slum tourism research also contributes to the conceptual development of the tourism-poverty nexus. The predominant choice of approaches in this field relies on quantitative indicators of poverty relief, but these do not sufficiently account for the Multi-dimensional character of poverty. The study of slum tourism research points to the multi-dimensional valorisation of poverty in tourism which is an aspect often overlooked in the state-of-the-art research on tourism and poverty

On the Question of Using the Concept ‘Slum Tourism’ for Urban Tourism in Stigmatised Neighbourhoods in Inner City Johannesburg

Since 2012, there has been a significant growth in tourism in inner city Johannesburg. Some of this tourism materialises as walking tours in disadvantaged and relatively poor inner city neighbourhoods, some of which were until recently considered no-go areas. In a paper published in Urban Forum in 2014 (Frenzel 2014), I have analysed this new phenomenon in the context of slum tourism. I define slum tourism as such forms of tourism where poverty and associated signifiers become central themes and (part of the) attraction of the visited destination. Following a broad empirical research project, Hoogendoorn and Giddy (2017) have questioned whether the concept slum tourism should be used when discussing tourism in inner city Johannesburg. This paper forms a response to the paper of Hoogendoorn and Giddy (2017)

Value Struggles in the Creative City: A ‘People’s Republic of Stokes Croft’?

In this paper we explore the case of Stokes Croft, Bristol, UK, as a neighbourhood in a city which has appropriated the discourse of the creative industries from the bottom up in order to foster its regeneration against capital’s art of rent. We show how Stokes Croft’s self-branding as a cultural quarter has led to struggles over the creative and cultural commons thus produced, which we conceptualise as value struggles where localised value practices clash with capital’s imposition of value. Our case study including two vignettes points both to the productivity of such value struggles in producing new value practices understood as commoning, as well as the limits of reproducing a common life in the face of existing financial and property regimes. Stokes Croft therefore serves as a case in point of the tragedy of the urban commons and points to potential ways of overcoming it

Making Slums Into Attractions: The Role of Tour Guiding in the Slum Tourism Development in Kibera and Dharavi

This article investigates how slums are made into a tourism attraction. We focus in particular on the role of tour guides and tour guiding operations in this process. In the tourism literature in general tour guiding has been subject to much reflection and debate. However, tour guides' role in enabling tourism in new places, in the making of attractions, has not been discussed much. Also, in the emerging research on slum tourism little attention has been given to tour guides and their roles. This article addresses both research gaps in providing insights into tour guiding in slum tourism, and by addressing the roles of tour guides in attraction making through a comparative analysis of tourism in two slums: Dharavi, in Mumbai, India, and Kibera, in Nairobi, Kenya. Based on empirical research of tour guiding operations we found that different levels of formality in tour guiding coexist across destinations. Formal tour guiding operations are more successful in establishing a slum as an attraction as they enable significant growth in tourist numbers. However, formal tour guiding operations and strong international participation in their foundation are factors that seem to undermine to some extent the creation of intimate and authentic encounters in tour guiding, preferred by some tourists. This leaves space for more informal tour guiding, with strong local ties, which are better placed to produce intimate experiences

Tourism valorisation: digitally enhanced tourist value practices and the geographies of inequality

Tourists' role in place valorisation processes is increasingly recognised. Not only do tourists play an important role in adding or subtracting value to places of attractions through their presence and practises during their visit, they also engage in value judgements through acts of evaluations, in particular via new online platforms. Such practices receive increasing scholarly attention but remain mostly undertheorized. Building on the concept of tourism valorisation and drawing from recent sociological research on valuation we widen the conceptual understanding of the ways in which tourists influence the value of places. This allows us to identify three conceptual dimensions of valorisation in tourism, namely practices that augment or reduce value (tourist valorisation), judge value (evaluation) and harness value (value capture). These findings allow us to address important questions prompted by the effects of tourism valorisation, in particular how and to what extent tourists and tourism contributes to geographies of inequality. Paying specific attention to the role of digital technologies, we embed their effects and impact in the wider conceptual discussion. New technologies enhance the ability of tourists to valorise and evaluate with specific geographical consequences, but also provide new avenues for value capture in the form of digital enclosures. Our findings enable a more theoretically grounded analysis of how digitally enhanced tourism influences the geographies of inequality.摘要游客在地方增值过程中所扮演的角色越来越被认可。游客不仅通过到达现场以及游览实践对增加或减少景点价值发挥重要作用, 他们还通过评价行为尤其在新的线上平台上的评价对景点进行价值判断。游客的这些实践越来越受到学者的关注, 但大多仍未理论化。在旅游增值概念的基础上, 借鉴最近关于价值评估的社会学研究, 我们拓宽了对游客影响地方价值方式的概念理解。这使我们能够确定旅游增值的三个概念维度, 即增加或减少价值的实践(游客增值)、判断价值(评估)和利用价值(价值获取) 这些发现让我们能够解决旅游增值效果所引发的重要问题, 特别是游客和旅游业是如何以及在多大程度上造成了地理上的不平等。我们特别重视数字技术的作用, 将它们的影响和冲击嵌入更广泛的概念中进行讨论。新技术提高了游客增值与评价产生特定地理效果的能力, 但也提供了以数字围栏形式获取价值的新途径。我们的研究结果有助于对数字技术武装的旅游业如何影响不平等地理进行更有理论依据的分析。</div

Einführung zum Teil II Gobaler Armutstourismus. Neue Entwicklungen, neue Perspektiven

Einführung zum Teil II Gobaler Armutstourismus. Neue Entwicklungen, neue Perspektive