A tale of two markets: Exploring the spatiality of market controversies

Favela tours

In Rio de Janeiro, several favelas have become touristic places, attracting thousands of tourists every year from all over the globe (Freire-Medeiros, 2009). While they have seen much growth in recent years, tours started in the 1990s, with tourism business from the ‘formal’ city – Rio de Janeiro ‘proper’– taking tourists up favelas (Freire-Medeiros, 2011, 2014).

Space has been key for the marketization of the favela. For example, the most touristic favelas are in the south zone of Rio de Janeiro, where most of the famous neighbourhoods and sights are (e.g. Copacabana, Ipanema, Christ the Redeemer). The architecture of favelas are also an important spatial element of the market agencement and makes them a distinguished and unmissable feature on the city’s landscape. This has historically been a device for ‘othering’ and framing favelas as ‘subnormal’ places and irregularly occupied land (IBGE, 2010), but also for exoticizing visits to favelas as tourists’ gaze was directed at the architecture. Figure 1 shows an example of the favela’s architecture being used on TripAdvisor to advertise a tour.OPEN IN VIEWER

During the tours delivered by non-indigenous tour guides, the fleeting visitors, onboard jeeps, would hear stories about the poverty and violence of drug gangs in the favela. Equipped with their cameras, tourists could observe and listen to stories of favelas that reinforced the representations sold to them in the media (see, for example, Galdos, 2014; Schipani and Harris, 2020; Sky News, 2018) about a dangerous, dispossessed, and exotic place (cf. Freire-Medeiros, 2009; The Telegraph, 2017) which they could fleetingly pass through, but with which they should not engage.

Cameras and jeeps were devices that continuously demarcated the boundaries of the spatial divide between city and hill (cf. Jovchelovitch and Priego-Hernández, 2013). Riding jeeps to ‘safeguard’ tourists from stepping into the favela and speaking to its peoples and photographing from afar were tourism practices that held frames of ‘safarisation’, ‘exoticism’ and ‘sub normality’ in place. The profits from tours left the favela with the jeeps as they made no stops in the favela, adding to the history of practices that kept favelas excluded from the economic flows of the city. The non-indigenous market agencement is framed around non-indigenous ownership and appropriation practices, and held together by devices such as cameras and jeeps, representations in media and census reports, and tourism practices of riding jeeps, photographing and storytelling that assemble the safari-style tour. Meanwhile, indigenous communities remained passive actors in the marketization of the favela. As such, we conceptualise the role of indigenous communities at this stage as non-marketizing.

Christmas in Lapland

Away from the warmth of Rio de Janeiro, wilderness, Santa, and Sámi people are some of the place-based ingredients for the marketization of Lapland:

Lapland is the northern-most region of Finland and an active outdoor destination that's known for its incredible, year-round light phenomena, vast arctic nature, and Santa Claus. The land of the indigenous Sámi people, known as Sámi homeland or Sápmi, also crosses the northern part of the region. Explore Finnish Lapland, Europe’s last great wilderness! (Visit Finland, 2024)

The Sámi are the only indigenous people in the European Union. They inhabit the region of Sápmi, which encompasses large northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Kola Peninsula, Russia, with a population of over 75,000. Around 10,000 Sámi live in Finland (Sámi Parliament, 2023). The Sámi have constitutional self-government in the Sámi Homeland since 1996 regarding their language and culture. The Sámi Parliament, elected by the Sámi, manages this self-government.

Over the past 50 years, Lapland has been marketized as the home of Santa Claus and tourism has become a key economic sector (for an overview of the marketization see Palo, 2023; Pretes, 1995). The Sámi and their homeland have always been part of the early marketization of Lapland as the Christmas tourism destination (Figure 2).OPEN IN VIEWER

As shown in these visuals, in addition to key devices, such as the aircraft, Lapland’s spatial market agencement embodies the wintery nature (natural inhabitancy for Santa), the man himself (using either reindeer or planes to fly around), and Sámi people (welcoming guests as good hosts).

The Sámi have been key in the making of Lapland’s market agencement. Promotional representations of Lapland included material and spatial stereotypical elements of the Sámi culture, such as outfits, handcrafts, reindeers, and nature. A mixture of facts and fiction of the Sámi culture materialised in the market offer, its representations, and tourism practices, often in a disrespectful way. For example, the use of fictional ‘shamans’ performing a ‘Lappish ceremony’ in which tourists are inaugurated as part of Lapland was common in the early days of Christmas and other tourism activities. This is often mistakenly connected to Sámi culture. The Sámi have also been depicted as ‘wild forest creatures’, such as in a promotional video produced by Visit Finland in 2015. As such, Lapland and the Sámi are ‘packaged’ as a market offer (cf. Urry, 2002), adding to the ‘mystique’ of Lapland. A typical representation of Lapland has included a person dressed in a Sámi costume on snowy hills with reindeers (see Christmas postcards in Figure 3).OPEN IN VIEWER

From the early marketization of Lapland as Santa’s home, such representations mobilised the space (cf. Lussault and Stock, 2010). The networks of human (the Sámi, Santa) and non-human actors (reindeers, snow), repeatedly staged and visualised in the postcards, made and performed ‘Santa Claus Land’ and became what visitors expected to experience when visiting Lapland. The non-human actors and place-based elements were particularly important in this (mostly) non-indigenous market agencement; without the snow, reindeer, and landscape, ‘greetings from Santa Claus Land’ would have seemed very different.

Favela tours

A steadily growing dissatisfaction amongst locals towards ‘outsiders’ gave rise to a type of controversy we label ‘boundaries of space’ (Figure 10). This was fuelled by non-indigenous frames, devices, representations and practices (cf. Mason et al., 2015) detailed above, for the ‘lack of interaction’ with locals (Carvalho, 2023). In a first moment, Resistance took the shape of complaints amongst residents against spatial boundaries of: whose stories should be heard (indigenous vs. non-indigenous), where Rocinha figures in the city (part of the city vs. problematic and exotic territories) and what counts as ‘the real favela’ (culturally charged home vs. violent places). Favelas residents started to call non-indigenous tours ‘safaris’ (cf. Jaguaribe and Hetherington, 2004) that showed ‘no respect’ for the community (Froio, 2015) and reinforced the historic boundaries between favela and the city that (in)famously framed Rio de Janeiro as ‘the broken city’ (Jovchelovitch and Priego-Hernández, 2013).

To resist the non-indigenous agencement, indigenous actors started to engage in new practices, assembling their own tours through new representations, including campaigning for inclusion in printed materials such as the city’s ‘Guia Oficial’ (Official Guide, our translation) (cf. Freire-Medeiros, 2007), and later online, with the help of devices such as smartphones, payments apps, internet and social media platforms (Fernandes et al., 2019). Additionally, in partnership with the city council, indigenous actors proposed setting guidelines for ‘Community-based responsible tours’ (Van Rompu, 2017). The bill aimed at making ‘some favelas Areas of Special Tourist Interest (AEIT) meaning that, in practice, these locations would be subject to a specific urbanisation regime and tourism regulations’ (Lisboa, 2016).

Representations, devices and practices form a powerful agencement that enables specific uses of Rocinha’s space while hindering others, which gave rise to what we term controversies of ‘uses of space’. For example, despite having a few main roads recognised on the official city map for tourism (RioTur, 2023) and on important navigation tools such as Google maps (Google Maps, 2024), most of Rocinha’s territory, made of narrow alleys accessible only on foot, continues to be invisible in the representations of Rio’s landscape. Due to the lack of a recognised and ‘official’ address, residents struggle to accomplish everyday tasks such as receiving mail, or having bank accounts, (cf. Barrense, 2024), a powerful reminder of the agency of place-based devices and non-humans in performing (market)places. Moreover, while the first occupants of Rocinha date back to the late 1800s (Figure 4 shows an already packed hillside), the 2010 government census reports defined favelas as ‘subnormal clusters’ and ‘irregular occupation of land owned by others’ (IBGE, 2010). Because of their performative power, these representations that frame favelas as a problem to be solved or eliminated from the city (cf. Watts, 2016) directly impact how the favela is used, lived, and recognised.OPEN IN VIEWER

In the run up to the 2016 Olympics, a welcomed metro line passing by Rocinha towards the West Zone and various Olympic events, was built. Yet, instead of carrying the favela’s name, the station was named São Conrado, after the wealthy borough opposite Rocinha (Figure 5). This had important implication for the uses of Rocinha’s space. The sign above the station’s entrance would give Rocinha visibility and recognise the favela as part of the city and its routes (De Andrade, 2016). Moreover, favela tour guides often have the metro station as the meeting point for tourists. Naming the station after Rocinha would be a device to agence touristic flows, but instead, it is yet another device for exclusion. Resistance, in this case, was deployed through petitions to the city government (De Andrade, 2016; Gois, 2016) to change the station’s name.OPEN IN VIEWER

In the same year, the city government erected panels printed with Rio’s Olympics imagery alongside the motorway connecting city and international airport. The motorway has favelas on both sides, meaning tourists and athletes arriving in Rio would have panels, rather than favelas, as their first sights. Favela entrepreneurs believed this was done deliberately to hide favelas from those attending the Olympics (Ferreira, 2016) and consequently, from the tourism route. Similarly to the metro station, the panels are devices to exclude favelas from Rio; they help assemble an agencement that relegates favelas to uses related to violence, poverty, and safari tourism. However, the topography of Rio de Janeiro joined communities in resisting these exclusionary attempts. The location of most favelas on Rio’s hills makes them unmissable in the city’s landscape (Figure 6). Here, the spatiality of favelas actively resists devices, representations and practices aimed at hiding them.OPEN IN VIEWER

Christmas in Lapland

The frames, devices, representations and practices put forward by non-indigenous actors collided with the Sámi community and resulted in a controversy of the boundaries of the market space: what should and can be included to represent and make up Lapland and what not, and in what ways. Mazzullo (2022) explains how, from the 1950s, Sámi people were increasingly represented in Lapland tourism as ‘exotic inhabitants of the wild North’, contrasted to the ‘civilized South’. In the 1980s, this accelerated due to the rise of Christmas tourism (Jaakkola, 2022). Already then, the Sámi started creating resisting devices, such as writing pamphlets and books opposing the tourism development in Lapland they believed had a negative impact on Sámi culture, land and livelihoods (Mazzullo, 2022).

A key artifact of the Sámi culture, the gákti (outfit), has been particularly often represented and reproduced in the marketization of Lapland in promotional materials, souvenirs, and performances, serving as a device to stage a ‘mystical’ Lapland for tourists using Sámi culture. In response to this, actors more and less formalised, including the Sámi parliament and Sámi craft association, but also others such as Sámi artists, bloggers, cultural influencers and entrepreneurs, have resisted the inclusion of the Sámi and their space in the framing of the market. For the chair of the Sámi craft association, the Sámi outfit is a ‘boundary post’; it is not merchandise and ‘will not be put on the market table’ (Yle News, 2016).

More recently, the tourism authorities in Lapland have been framing a more balanced, all year-round tourism market to reduce the seasonal pressure and overreliance on Christmas. Such seasonal plans act as a device to extend the use of Lapland for tourism and create representations that build on its nature. Practices go beyond meeting Santa drawing on place-based features of Lapland and non-human actors, such as snowshoeing on the Finnish thick snow, walking the tundra and gazing at the northern lights, fat-biking across woodland, ice-fishing, and the midnight sun. For example, on TripAdvisor (2024), ‘Things to do in Lapland’ include ‘Santa Claus Village, Arktikum, Winter Sports, Nature and Wildlife Tours’. Here, the landscape is visualised without any humans, demonstrating the ‘untouched’ nature waiting to be explored through various tourism-related spatial practices.

This however poses a controversy of the colliding uses of space through the contradicting framings of the non-indigenous tourism authorities and the Sámi Parliament and community regarding the landscape and its wilderness. Magga (2022: 134) frames this controversy, writing ‘the scarcity of human-made traces – have made the Sámi homeland appear as wilderness rather than a cultural environment in the eyes of the non-Sámi’. From these spatial market representations (e.g. marketing materials from postcards to websites), it becomes a matter of what one can see and what is concealed. While the Lapland tourism market offer is explicitly framed in relation to and including the ‘wilderness’ of the land, this landscape is simultaneously the home and source of many traditional livelihoods for Sámi, such as fishing, handcrafts, hunting, and reindeer herding (Sámi Parliament, 2023), which may not be visible for tourists. The rise of controversies in Lapland further shows how resistance as a mechanism in the rise of controversies relates to spatial staging and concealment of Lapland across networks of representations, devices and practices.

Favela tours

To reframe/reborder Rocinha from ‘safarisation’ to a humanised, friendly, and historically sensitive favela, indigenous actors focused on assembling new devices, representations and practices. Actors also shapeshifted and assumed a new role as entrepreneurs and started offering the so-called ‘reality tours’ (Jaguaribe and Salmon, 2012). Importantly, favela entrepreneurs are also Rocinha residents and as such, return to the everyday life of being a resident when they are not delivering tours, or involved in work to develop the market (e.g. campaigning, meeting with local council). Tours delivered by indigenous actors typically entailed the new practices of walking the favela, rather than passing onboard jeeps, and learning about the history of the formation of favelas in place (e.g. the occupation of hills as the only ‘empty’ land in the city), speaking to members of the community, eating in local restaurants, and listening to critiques to ‘safari’ approaches to tourism (Froio, 2015).

The growing access to devices such as internet, computers and later smartphones transformed social media into a powerful ally of favela entrepreneurs to reframe/reborder the market agencement (Berndt and Boeckler, 2011). Virtually free – no advertising agency or printing fees – platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TripAdvisor and AirBnB allow locals to create and share representations of Rocinha that recognise the favela as an inclusive, authentic part of Rio and Brazil (see Figure 7 with tourists walking in Rocinha and riding the local moto-taxis). In turn, this is aimed at attracting the ‘right’ type of tourist, to ensure money stays in the favela (Robertson, 2012) and to act as a performative device in changing practices (cf. Finch et al., 2018). Practices change as tourists come to Rocinha, later sharing photos of and recommending such experiences, bridging the onsite and remote representations of the space. Representations of this kind mobilise space (Lussault and Stock, 2010) as they show Rocinha as a safe place to visit. Once on site, tourists and indigenous community practice the favela in a new way and help bring the ‘safe favela’ (cf. Phillips, 2013) into being.OPEN IN VIEWER

The collective tourism practices of walking, eating, chatting, and learning in place perform a frame/border of the favela that is more truthful to locals’ vision of what is ‘the real’ favela. The market agencement is reframed to recognise Rocinha’s historical struggle and resilience, as a place of community and livelihood, and as an integral part of the city. While ‘safari tours’ are still available, tourists searching for a ‘respectful tour’ are advised to hire indigenous tours (De Souza, 2015). The controversy of boundaries of space is settled through ‘authentic tours’, formed of devices, representations and practices put forward by indigenous actors. However, the settlement is precarious. Representations of favelas focused on gangs’ violence continue to exist, sometimes escalating to debates about the place of favelas and favela tourism in the city (Antunes, 2017; Brito, 2017; Stycer, 2017) which threaten to deborder the market agencement.

Aiming at settling the controversy of uses of space, the city government, responsible for naming the metro station by Rocinha after the wealthy São Conrado, defended its decision as a regular procedure of international norms of naming (De Andrade, 2016). However, Rocinha residents’ activism led to the renaming of the station (see Figure 8).OPEN IN VIEWER

Changing the name of the station helped settle the controversy by plotting Rocinha on the city metro map (on and offline) legitimating it as a borough of the city (De Andrade, 2016). From this, tourism entrepreneurs can direct incoming visitors with the same ease they would to Ipanema, bringing Rocinha, in a practical and representational sense, closer to world-renowned touristic sites in Rio de Janeiro. For those en route to the favela, maps and station serve as devices to make calculations about transport. When tourists do so, and arrive at the favela, they deploy (per) (trans)formative tourism practices that remake it into a humanised, indigenously populated touristic place.

Christmas in Lapland

As an attempt to settle the two types of spatial market controversies in Lapland, market boundaries were reframed and protected with devices in the shape of guidelines and instructions, which resisted the staging of the Sámi. Addressing the boundary controversy, actors started to reclaim their space in the market through new material devices to frame/border (cf. Berndt and Boeckler, 2011) boundaries across the Sámi, tourism, and Lapland. The Sámi’s concern about the promotional video by Visit Finland depicting fake Sámi outfits resulted in a new edition excluding these parts (Yle News, 2015). In 2016, a marketing agency in Lapland asked for guidance on how to use images of the Sámi. House of Lapland (2016) states the following principles as guidance for the use of images of Lapland and the Sámi:

1. If a photograph depicts a Sámi, the person in the photograph should be a Sámi.

Photography of the market and the place (e.g. people and their outfits) and the list of principles act as material devices to address the controversy about the market boundaries. The photograph is a key type of representation that brings elements of the place to the fore. The list further states that ‘the easiest way to ensure that the principles detailed above are followed is to employ a Sámi photographer’. This is an example of how the Sámi shapeshifted into marketizing actors to help non-indigenous actors represent their cultural space authentically. Other devices soon appeared in attempts to further frame the market offer, the agencies and their encounters (Çalışkan and Callon, 2010).

Aiming to settle both controversies, in 2018, the Sámi Parliament released the ‘Principles for Responsible and Ethically Sustainable Sámi Tourism’. These outline ethical guidelines for the tourism market in both textual and visual formats. The visuals depict both wrongful and ethical practices in the marketization of Lapland (Figure 9), and incorporate a network of spatial representations, devices and practices according to the desired tourism market. In ‘the future we do not want’, the landscape is packed with people, buildings, and vehicles, the nature is filled with rubbish, and tourist practices are disrespectful towards the nature and culture. In the opposite scenario, the Sámi community’s role is shapeshifting, guiding the respectful relationship with non-human actors. The aim of these guidelines was to ‘to terminate tourism exploiting Sámi culture and to eliminate incorrect information about the Sámi distributed through tourism’, and the marketization of Sámi culture by ‘outsiders’ (Sámi Parliament, 2023). In their framing of the market,

…there is a Sámi tourism information centre distributing accurate information on the Sámi and Sámi culture to visitors and various interest groups in tourism industry. Furthermore, the centre has information about the responsibly and ethically sustainably operating Sámi tourism entrepreneurs. In the good vision, also the everyday lives and festivities of the Sámi community as well as land use in Sámi Homeland have been successfully co-ordinated with tourism... (Sámi Parliament, 2023).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 9.

Illustrations of ‘the future we do and do not want’, published as part of the ‘principles for Responsible and ethically sustainable Sámi Tourism’ (Sunna Kitti/Sámi Parliament in Finland, 2019).

The guidelines frame the market with a multitude of actors and their spatial relations. Sámi entrepreneurs, the tourism information centre, and the Sámi community and homeland elements are agenced in this market frame as a more respectful way to organise tourism (cf. Cochoy, 2020; Holmes et al., 2021). The reconfigured market agencement tries to address the lack of coordination between traditional livelihoods and other competing forms of land use (e.g. tourism, forestry), and recognises a more symbiotic and harmonic relation between people, culture and the material landscape across tourism and Sámi livelihoods. The place itself remains as ‘unexploited’ as possible, but the space allows the inclusion of new shapeshifting actors. However, settling work is ongoing. Overflows are temporarily contained (cf. Geiger and Gross, 2018) as new questions related to the ethical use of land and exploitation of tourism arise, especially amidst climate change and conservation concerns.