Homeless Tourism

Craille Maguire Gillies, a journalist writing for The Guardian, took part in a growing industry of tours led by homeless people. While visiting Prague she took a tour from a man named Robert Pochop, "Over the next 24 hours, he will take me on endless trams and trains, to his favourite haunts and even to city limits, to show me what life as a homeless person – or at least his life – is like," she writes.

"The tours come at a time when some cities are attempting to effectively outlaw homelessness," Maguire Gillies writes. There is a tension in these types of tours between what is an earnest investigation of life as many people live it in cities around the world and something more exploitative, a gaping at hardship. One tour group described itself this way: "Pragulic is a social enterprise that challenges the stereotypes associated with homelessness by enabling people to experience the world from a homeless perspective."