Foreigners, fakes and flycatchers: stereotypes, social encounters and the problem of discomfort on the street in Arusha, Tanzania

Abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to contribute to research on the interrelations between urban tourism, travelling and landscapes. It shows how young visitors to the tourism-reliant city of Arusha, northern Tanzania, experience and interpret discomfiting encounters with street sellers by drawing on stereotypes circulating in guidebooks, online forums and in the tourism industry. In turn, such re-interpreted encounters are increasingly seen as problematic for the city’s development of urban tourism.Design/methodology/approachThe author draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with tourist-product street sellers in Arusha and Moshi, Tanzania in 2015–2017. With detail-oriented focus on social interaction and communication, the author has used participant observation and interviews to understand the perspectives and actions involved. Complementing this, the author draws on interviews with tour companies and local authorities to connect everyday occurrences with broader political, economic and urban transformations.FindingsThis paper explores the interrelation between changing urban landscapes, gentrification and burgeoning urban tourism by highlighting not only how streets are created and sought to be re-created but how also re-interpreted stories and stereotypes fundamentally influence how it is understood by local authorities. As the consumption of place, shopping and foreigners’ experiences take centre stage in Arusha’s urban development project, practices and people that are re-interpreted as causes of discomfort, become objects of ordering and discipline.Originality/valueThis paper emphasizes that the social encounters beyond dichotomies of host–guest relationships are a fruitful and important means of investigating how “encounters” connect space to power, the street to urban planning and mundane on-the-street interactions to processes of transformation and gentrification. This paper presents a reading of “landscapes” not as a text, but as a series of encounters that catch our attention when and where they break our norms, or the norms of others.