User-generated insight of Rio’s Rocinha favela tour: Authentic attraction or vulnerable living environment?

Abstract

Urban transformations help shape new opportunities and create/re-create awareness in everyday living environments. It is not transformation in the infrastructural sense, but transformation in the form of a service industry producing socio-economic change that can result in inclusion and exclusion of people in the community, thus affecting the everyday living environment. Within this, we need to consider the tourist gaze and how users who visit/tour vulnerable living environments report perceptions of their experiences on forums such as TripAdvisor, which helps researchers frame understandings of commodification, opportunities/awareness and even authenticity (each addressed in this paper). This paper evaluates TripAdvisor posts of ‘Rio’s Rocinha Favela Tour’. In many respects, the notion of commodification, and even authenticity, runs through each theme, but the analysis and data posted to TripAdvisor challenges us to consider how a favela becomes a consumer product or a tourist attraction. The Rocinha Favela tour is widely publicised to prospective visitors as a chance to experience a living and working favela, the focus of the first theme presented in this paper. Given Rocinha has become a popular attraction in Rio, this leads to the second theme: opportunity or awareness. Opportunities do exist for people in the community to get involved in tourism, and turning the favela into a product helps shape and maintain awareness. The third theme builds on and relates to the previous two, but focuses more on the semblances of authenticity that emerges. To link the points highlighted in this paper, a discussion of soft power concerns relationships bonded through economic and cultural influence. Because favelas have become distinct attractions, it is cultural appeal and a different (residential) side of the city that persuades travellers to visit. Online and social media platforms for more than a decade now have played an important role today in projecting images and promoting authentic experiences based on user-perceptions, and this paper looks at how the users communicate their experiences.

New notions of soft power: Impact rhetoric in mega-event bid documents

“…The purpose of that special issue was to address the confluence of political and cultural ideals by looking at this term in relation to urban regeneration and leisure. Soft power is about co-opting and building preference through popular appeal in order to shape attitudes around opinions or ways to doing or developing (see Maguire, 2019; Wise et al, 2019; Wu and Jimura (2019). Soft power is something that is mobilized at the level of the nation state to connect and unite people (Huq, 2019).…”

Urban and Rural Event Tourism and Sustainability: Exploring Economic, Social and Environmental Impacts

“…Economic sustainability is ever-pressing, especially as competition to attract tourists, consumers and new clientele bases is increasing and thus destinations need to host events or display tourism products that are up-to-date and meet current demands [19,20]. However, there is increased emphasis on social and community impacts, perhaps as these are intangible impacts that relate to local attitudes about places as well as quality of life for residents and businesses in destinations [21][22][23][24][25], especially as places continually change and transform-which then calls for new forms of participation [26,27] and ways of evaluating social impacts [28].…”

Legacies of the 2016 Olympic Games: Perception of Public Policies Researchers on Sport and Leisure

“…In addition to these restructurations in the central area and in the Olympic Park, the process of building a new image and showing off the city of Rio de Janeiro includes using slums as places of intervention and tourism, which can generate income and jobs, as well as a commodification of that environment, excluding the least favored. For Wise et al 24 , the slums are seen as undesirable, dangerous and high risk, but they are also communities that participate in a dense urban environment, in which practices from different sectors are developed, including tourism, which can alter the activities of that environment, and consequently, generate processes of social inclusion or exclusion, causing both positive and negative impacts. At the same time that it provides financial income for some, it can also commercialize the place, making life more difficult for people who cannot keep up with the changes.…”

“…Indirect displacements and removals are called gentrification, and refer to the increase in housing costs, which expels people who are unable to stay in these places 21,24 . The areas revitalization due to megaevents, values places previously considered popular and thus become valued by the real estate sector, increasing rental and purchase prices, thus expelling people who are unable to live in those places.…”