In this comment piece on global urbanism, I draw together the politics of representation and the politics of poverty by considering how representations of slums have multiple and varied effects, both entrenching and contesting dominant ideas of urbanism. The Third World megacity has become the icon of underdevelopment, the shorthand for the dysfunction and its alchemic energy, and the recognizable frame through which cities in the global south are recognized and their differences are located and mapped (Rao 2006; Roy 2011a). I will interrogate what this image does to how we understand poverty in the global south by using slum tours as my object of analysis. Engaging the growing popularity of slum tours globally, I question whether it is possible to construct a new politics of solidarity or whether these tours simply engage in what has been called an “aestheticization of poverty” (Roy 2003).

In urban studies, debates around global urbanism have raised the problematic division between cities in the developing and developed worlds. First World cities often set the agenda for urban studies and theory, while those in the global south continue to be viewed as megacities, analyzed through the lens of developmentalism as sites of poverty and underdevelopment and as peripheral to the global economy (Robinson 2002). There are many ways in which this dichotomy is produced and reproduced, representation being one of them. Roy (2003:289), drawing on Spivak, argues that to talk about cities, development, and urban …