 CAB International 2015. Transformational Tourism: Host Perspectives (ed. Y. Reisinger) 93 8 The Travelling Favela: Cosmopolitanisms from Above and from Below Bianca Freire-Medeiros and Gabriel Cohen Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil imprecision, we tend to agree with those authors who have referred to a sense of timeliness – or even urgency – about the question of cosmo- politanism in both theoretical and practical terms (Rabinow, 1996; Beck, 2002b; Szerszyn- ski and Urry, 2002). The ‘travelling favela’ (favela being the Brazilian term for an urban slum) is a notion that emerged in the context of one of the authors’ writings on poverty tourism (Freire-Medeiros, 2013) and refers to various flows, global narratives and cultural products that position ‘the favela’ – a place associated with poverty and violence – as a trademark and a tourist attraction. We begin by discussing an ongoing research project on the practices of tourism in Rio de Janeiro favelas which has, as one of its main empirical references, a locality called Morro Pereira da Silva – a small community in the well-off South Zone located on the hill between the Bohemian Santa Teresa district and the uppermiddle class Laranjeiras district. ‘Pereirão’, as its residents call it, is a territory where tourism mobilities, although humble in scale when compared to other touristic favelas such as Rocinha and Santa Marta (see Freire- Medeiros, 2013 ), have been acquiring a rather complex shape due to the presence of a mix of playground, art installation and social project called Morrinho (little hill in Portuguese). Con- tradicting what happens in most favelas, which are turned into tourist destinations (for various Introduction The present chapter reflects upon the potentiali- ties and limits of tourism on transforming local residents and their worldviews in a context of economic inequality and social segregation. We do so by confronting two notions, one that is widely used – ‘cosmopolitanism’, and another – ‘travelling favela’ (Freire-Medeiros, 2013), which intends to be an unassuming contribu- tion to the New Mobilities Paradigm (see Sheller and Urry, 2006; Urry, 2007). This paradigmatic shift helps us to rethink understandings of place, power and politics within relational ontologies that highlight openness and change rather than boundedness and permanence. We are espe- cially interested on the idea that mobilities are always complex and never restricted to a mere dislocation between two points and need to be considered in differential and relational ways. The combined use of the notions of cosmopoli- tanism and travelling favela in this chapter, therefore, attempts to highlight that mobilities carry a co-relationality between material and symbolic issues involved in the very act of moving. Critics charge that a vexing multiplicity of uses and overuses has turned ‘cosmopolitan- ism’ into one of those notions, along with glo- balization and neoliberalism, which encompass so much that no useful meaning emerges (see Beck, 2002a). Although acknowledging this