Routes in the Suburbs of a Marvelous City: Tourism Mobilities and Urban Peripheries in the Global South

In the last decade, a group of agencies specializing in tourist routes and guides have emerged in Rio de Janeiro in neighborhoods and regions that were previously unimaginable from this perspective. For a long time, the Marvelous City was seen and reproduced in landscapes that emphasize the exuberance of beaches and mountains, serving as a backdrop to a diverse and complex urban life. However, Brazil's most famous and visited city preserves a region marked by other aesthetic elements, such as the passing of the train, which have only recently been addressed from the gaze of tourists.

Still timidly, promoters of these activities have focused on small groups of visitors, mostly from the city itself - but not only. The suburbs have symbolized the lifestyles of the poor middle class of the metropolis, but not the poorest - these occupy the imaginative geography of the favelas and more distant outskirts. In the composition of urban alterities, the suburbs of Rio express one of these possibilities, which has attracted Brazilians to these itineraries, but which remains unknown to foreigners.

This presentation seeks to analyze the emergence of tourist routes in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, reflecting on the imaginations that have produced, updated and moved the category. The research is ongoing and is carried out based on the monitoring of these agencies and the study of the production of these itineraries, considering their discourses, frequencies and visitors. In parallel, the investigation focuses on the social representations that involve the suburbs of Rio through a set of widely circulated cultural productions. The objective is to contribute to the understanding of the role of tourism promotion in the imaginative mobilities that involve the urban peripheries of the Global South.