Imagine the scene: tourists riding in a jeep through Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro’s largest favela. With their cameras at the ready, they listen to stories of gang violence and gawp at people’s homes, believing they are learning about the “real” Rio beyond the glamorous beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema.
Far away from the South American warmth, tourists arrive in Finnish Lapland eager to meet a man in a red suit with a big white beard, maybe taking part in a “shaman ceremony” staged as an authentic piece of Sámi culture.
On the surface, these might seem like examples of tourism with good intentions to engage with local culture. But a closer look reveals the same old historical struggle: who gets to decide what a place is, who profits from it, and the consequences that follow.
In our research, we have spent years investigating the favela and Christmas tourism markets. Using news articles, archival material, tourism brochures, government documents, videos and photographs, we traced the controversies that have arisen in the process of marketing Rocinha and Lapland as tourist destinations. We found that controversies over tourism are, at their core, disputes over space.
Whose place is it?
Both Rocinha and Lapland are rife with disputes over space. Tours in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas – the sprawling urban communities often described as “shantytowns” – have been marketed for decades, especially those in Zona Sul (South Zone).
At their inception, many tours were operated by businesses outside the favelas, and involved a “safari”-style experience with tourists in jeeps cruising through the area. Jeeps signalled favelas as places to observe at a distance rather than engage with, while driving profits out of the community.
The 2010 Brazilian census itself labelled these communities as “subnormal clusters” occupying land irregularly, a language that did well to summarise decades of exclusion from public investment, and continued to fuel policies of eviction.
When a new metro station opened across the street from Rocinha ahead of the 2016 Olympics, it was named after the wealthy neighbouring São Conrado instead.
Around the same time, so-called decorative panels went up along the motorway from the airport, screening favelas from arriving visitors and athletes. Both were quiet decisions about geography that carried a loud message: this place doesn’t, or shouldn’t, exist.
Similar practices can be observed in Lapland. The Sámi are the indigenous people of the region known as Sápmi, which spans the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, with around 10,000 Sámi living in Finland today.
They have inhabited and worked this landscape for centuries — fishing, herding reindeer, and maintaining cultural traditions including the gákti, their traditional clothing. Yet from the 1950s, tourism marketing increasingly cast the Sámi as exotic inhabitants of the wild north.
The land and nature have been staged as empty wilderness for tourism to make use of and visitors to explore. However, that “wilderness” is also the Sámi homeland – a living cultural landscape, rather than simply an untouched frontier. Elements of Sámi culture, most notably the gákti, are reproduced on souvenirs and worn by hired performers welcoming tourists or taking part in invented ceremonies that borrow elements of Sámi tradition to stage a “mystical” Lapland.
In both cases, the ways in which the space was staged, represented and used by tourism became contested and questioned by local communities.
Recognition and respect
Indigenous communities’ dissatisfaction with how their places were marketed compelled them to change how tourism is done. Favela entrepreneurs began running their own “reality tours” to counter the jeep tours.
This format means visitors walk through the neighbourhood, eat at local restaurants, and visit a local art atelier or watch a capoeira performance, an Afro-Brazilian martial art disguised as dance. Crucially, visitors get to hear the community’s own history rather than a script written by outsiders, and profits stay in the community.
In Lapland, a number of local bodies, including the Sámi parliament and the Sámi craft association, pushed back too. They insisted the gákti was not merchandise and issued detailed guidelines on how the Sámi could be represented in photographs and marketing.
In 2018, the Sámi parliament published formal principles for ethical tourism, illustrated with images contrasting a crowded, exploitative “future we do not want” with a respectful alternative built around genuine Sámi livelihoods.
Notably, in both cases, local communities didn’t reject tourism outright. Instead, they did what we termed “temporary shapeshifting” – stepping into the role of market-makers, becoming tour guides, marketing consultants and policy negotiators while remaining residents the rest of the time. They moved between being subjects of a market and active participants shaping it, rather than being permanently cast as either powerless victims or savvy business owners.
Lessons for sustainable tourism
Our research shows how markets are rooted in real places, among real communities, and disputes about these spaces (who belongs where, whose land counts as “empty”, whose name goes on the map) are often where conflict lies. That has implications beyond favelas and Santa’s Lapland.
Any business built around a place carries the same risk of writing some people out of the map while selling their homeland to someone else. The lesson from Rio and Lapland is that resolving these tensions rarely means shutting tourism down.
It means recognising that the people who live, work and do business in a place – residents, entrepreneurs and community members alike – all have a stake in how it is represented, used and sold. The most sustainable way forward is a collaborative one, where the market is shaped by local communities and recognition and respect is at the centre of conversations.
Comments are closed.