Creative tourism can help transform lives
Townships, informal settlements need to get a bigger slice of the pie
ALTHOUGH national politicians, including President Cyril Ramaphosa, and municipal destination managers often hail the role of tourism in stimulating economic opportunities and enhancing cultural heritage in South Africa, township tourism has developed a bad reputation.
Some feel that visits to townships exploit the poor by degrading their homes and suburbs, and turning them into spectacles for rich, voyeuristic foreign visitors.
It is a sad view based on some fact. Research has confirmed that many tour operators are large firms which operate from outside townships and local people rarely benefit from their activities.
At the same time, township entrepreneurs seeking to enter the market find it difficult to operate and sustain their enterprises.
However, a new increasingly popular approach dubbed “creative tourism” may hold the key to limiting such exploitative practices and unlocking tourism’s potential to contribute to poverty alleviation in townships, spreading the benefits of growth in the sector to marginalised areas.
Creative tourism, which has grown internationally, focuses on a new kind of tourist interested in active learning experiences and meaningful interactions with local people.
The concept can entail the promotion of creative experiences, events and precincts. Creative experiences involve interaction between visitors and hosts in which the tourists are afforded opportunities to become co-creators of the experiences that they consume. These typically include arts, crafts and design activities; musical experiences; encounters in the field of health, healing and spirituality; cooking and gastronomy; or heritage and storytelling activities.
The emphasis in all these encounters should be upon the unique and authentic aspects of local culture which can provide a rich experience. For example, the cultural focus of creative events is often on the performing or visual arts which may include festivals, parades, street-art projects and outdoor exhibitions.
Such tourism can also make an important contribution to the establishment of creative precincts, which bring together creative firms in a single district. Tourism services such as accommodation, restaurants, shopping facilities and markets can play a significant role in developing such precincts.
Woodstock in Cape Town and the Maboneng Precinct in Joburg are outstanding examples of distinctive urban spaces in which creative urban redevelopment has been coupled with tourism.
However, although studies have found that visitors to townships are attracted by their vibrancy and interested in culture-based attractions, activities and experiences in these areas, the provision of tourism products based on cultural resources remains limited. The typical township tour in South African cities continues to consist of taking (mainly foreign) visitors to anti-apartheid Struggle heritage sites and places of poverty.
The challenge is how the current dominant approach to township tourism may be reconfigured to offer a more sustainable alternative that provides a less demeaning experience for the residents of informal settlements and a more authentic experience for visitors, while also helping to combat local poverty through generating economic opportunities and upgrading township spaces.
Exploratory investigations in Soweto and Langa in Cape Town have found that new creative tourism products are being developed in response to latent international and domestic visitor demand. For example, one prominent creative tourism initiative, the Maboneng Township Arts Experience, offers a street-art tour in Langa.
Visitors are taken on a walkabout to view local street art celebrating the area’s Struggle heritage, as well as musicians, sport stars and historical notables either from, or associated with, the place. In addition, visitors are accompanied to home galleries to view art works, interacting with their hosts and joining art-making activities. The initiative is a social enterprise which emphasises the benefits that local people derive directly from their involvement.
The Maboneng Township Arts Experience, which also operates in Joburg’s Alexandra township and in Madadeni in KwaZulu-Natal, further includes an annual street festival that opens homes as spaces for art exhibitions, music performances or storytelling that recounts family histories. In Soweto, the Makhelwane street festival transforms homes into eateries, galleries and fashion boutiques.
It is important to note that such creative tourism happenings are often aimed as much at domestic as at international visitors. In this regard, cultural events that mainly target local residents and day-trippers as well as other domestic tourists may also be marketed to international visitors to expand the existing creative tourism offering in townships.
The emphasis on culture can also lead to the establishment of precincts in which creativity forges significant socio-economic opportunities.
In Soweto, the existing tourism precincts such as around Vilakazi Street are centred on promoting the country’s Struggle heritage but in Langa a cultural tourism precinct has clearly started to develop in its own right.
Such precincts need strengthening as centres of cultural production and consumption to leverage the benefits that creative tourism can bring, which may be achieved most effectively through the establishment of multipurpose cultural centres. These should benefit local residents socially, economically and culturally, as well as providing important leisure facilities; help to attract more visitors; and contribute to the physical upgrading of surrounding township spaces.
Culture can generate inclusive, economic growth. In South Africa’s townships, creativity in the form of a new kind of tourism can enable more people to participate in the local economy with direct benefits, offering opportunities for the physical upgrading of townships and stimulating consumption among both local and international visitors while spurring the development of leisure spaces. For the visitors, it provides a less voyeuristic and more authentic cultural experience.
However, more research is required into the nature, scale and supply of creative tourism activities in townships, as well as domestic and international visitor demand, to unlock the potential benefits of this relatively new socio-economic form. In particular the sustainability challenges faced by creative townships entrepreneurs and their enterprises need to be identified so appropriate support may be provided.
The connections between creative tourism and the marketing of destinations also need to be explored more fully. Also, development researchers and practitioners as well as town planners should conduct and/or support such research.