Potter’s new book explores how we’ve come to perceive what’s real. Knowing we can only look back for a greater understanding of the present, and maybe the future, Potter starts with Socrates and works up to now. Though it sprawls and meanders sometimes, this book is an effort to explain why we’re looking for what we want.

Potter weaves Descartes and Marx with Paris Hilton and Seinfeld, touching on personal identity, art, environmentalism, and consumer culture. He’s aware of the corruptions and costs of modern life, but rejecting society and all her comforts is not the answer, he concludes. Benedictine monk Dom Deschamps is quoted on his vision of “authentic” commune living without intellectuals: “no books, no writing, no art: all that would be burned.” Potter shoots back with a pop culture riposte: two cavemen in a New Yorker cartoon enjoy clean air, water, exercise, and organic food, “yet nobody lives past thirty.” Authenticity, it turns out, has its discontents.

Slumdog Millionaire Child star Azharuddin Ismail plays in his shanty on May 30, 2009 in Mumbai, India. Ismail's family faced evicition from their dwelling in spring 2009. Photo by Getty.

It can be an eye-opening experience that helps everyone involved move towards greater understanding….

It’s been happening in Rio’s famous favelas for some time. Now slum tourism—which turns a real-life ghetto into a “hot” tourist destination—has spread to Johannesburg, Manila, Cairo, and, in the wake of the blistering success of Slumdog Millionaire, Mumbai. But it’s controversial wherever it goes.

Shelley Seale, author of The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India, thinks slum tourism (also known as “poorism”) can be positive for both visitors and locals, but only if it’s done right. Seale toured the Dharavi slum in Mumbai, Asia’s largest slum and the setting for Slumdog, with Deepa Krishnan of Mumbai Magic, a socially responsible tour operator who donates a portion of her profits to local NGOs.

“Dharavi gave me a resounding rebuttal to the myth that poverty is the result of laziness,” Seale says. “I have never seen people work so hard. The place abounded with an industry and entrepreneurship such as I have not ever witnessed anywhere else. “It was an amazing experience, and I believe that things like this can do a lot to eradicate cultural bias and misunderstandings, and also the images of poverty that many of us have.”

…but it can also be exploitative and tarnishing to India’s global image

Indians tend to be very sensitive about their country’s identity. Many didn’t embrace the feel-goodism of Slumdog because they felt the film portrayed their country in a negative light, without offering explanations or solutions for the living conditions in the slum.

Likewise, Indian tourism professionals tend to be wary of slum tourism. They feel it can be exploitative, turning people’s lives into sideshow spectacle and obliterating both the slum dwellers’ humanity and the underlying issues, like India’s unrelenting rural to urban migration.

There are also justifiable concerns about who conducts the tours, and how. Ronjon Lahiri, director of India Tourism in Toronto, says that many of the so-called slum tourism operators are only looking to make a buck and don’t educate tourists on Dharavi and its residents.

He says that many people live there because Mumbai’s property prices are among the highest in the world. Even when residents make money, many don’t leave because Dharavi has become their home, their community.

For Lahiri, “Slum tourism is not to be encouraged. It is not good for India and not good for the people living there.”

Google Map's incomplete data for Kibera, among the world's largest slums. An open source mapping project aims to provide a clearer picture.

Kibera, one of the world’s biggest slums, is a “glaring omission” on Google Maps, says Erica Hagen, member of the Map Kibera team. Indeed, Kibera remains a blank spot in relatively well-mapped and densely populated Nairobi, the economic hub of East Africa.

When I first heard of this project, my first thought was of the potential harm that mapping this area could do. Would the government highjack the data, mapping and labeling households by ethnicity? Of course, all technology has pitfalls. Remember the use of cell phones during the Kenyan election crisis to spread hate? It would serve Map Kibera well to monitor how the government and local political groups use this new information and for what means.

Regardless, mapping Kibera does have some expected benefits. As Hagen points out, community groups are willing to participate because they think having a geographical marker might make service claims to the government easier. There would be a visual representation of where schools, clinics and water delivery services, for example, are missing.

In a community saturated with development organizations, mapping might also better situate who is working where and potentially help avoid overlaps between groups. For Westerners, it is a practical matter of being able to navigate the complex community they do not belong to, but so desperately want to volunteer in.

Google Maps brings us visual representations of the nooks and crannies of the world we would probably never have time or money to visit. This points to another advantage of mapping Kibera. Hagen is working with a group of youth who produce short clips of their community and upload to YouTube. By linking these clips to different areas of Kibera on a map there is the potential to better educate and situate Kibera for the aid-giving Westerners who see the region as in need of saving.

Kibera has been mapped before, says Hagen, who met with volunteers who had mapped the whole district for another non-governmental organization. However, they never saw the results. This time, Map Kibera wants to do things differently. Hosting the map on Open Street Map (an open-source software which the public can edit) allows others to contribute to the mapping of Kibera.

Map Kibera has also hired twelve local youth, most having just finished their high school degrees, to walk through the community with GPS devices and identify the streets, alleys, clinics, schools and so on in the area. She hopes that after this training, they will be able to spread the word (both through printed maps and the off-chance of Internet access) and ensure community engagement. “Sustainability is always difficult,” says Hagen, but she assures me that Map Kibera is working with local organizations like Ushahidi.

Stay updated for further initiatives after the initial mapping to be completed in three weeks on their website.