Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in DubaiEveryday Life in the Spectacular City is a groundbreaking urban ethnography that reveals how middle-class citizens and longtime residents of Dubai interact with the city's so-called superficial spaces to create meaningful social lives. Rana AlMutawa shows that inhabitants adapt themselves to top-down development projects, from big malls to megaprojects. These structures serve residents' evolving social needs, transforming Dubai's spectacular spaces into personally important cultural sites. These practices are significant because they expand our understanding of agency as not only subversive but also adaptive. Through extensive fieldwork, AlMutawa, herself an Emirati native to Dubai, finds a more nuanced story of belonging. This story does not seek to uncover the "real" city that lies beneath the veneer of the spectacle, but rather to demonstrate that social meanings and forms of belonging take place within the spectacle itself. By offering an alternative to the discourse of authenticity and elucidating the dynamics of ambivalent belonging, AlMutawa belies stereotypes that portray Dubai's developments as alienating and inherently disempowering. Everyday Life in the Spectacular City speaks beyond the Middle East to a globalized phenomenon, for Dubai's spectacles are unexceptional in today's changing world. |
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abaya Abdulla Abu Dhabi academic adaptive agents Ahmed Kanna Ajman Akinci Alawadi AlShehabi Arab Arabian Arabian Peninsula areas argued beach binaries chapter City Walk city’s coffee cosmopolitanism creative class critique cultural Deira City depicted described discourses of authenticity diversity Dubai Mall elites Elsheshtawy emirates Emirati women engage environment everyday example exclusion experiences feel felt freej glitzy global Global City grew groups Gulf cities highlights illiberal Impossible Citizens inauthentic Indian inhabitants instance interlocutors interviewed Kanna khaleeji Koch Kuwait Lamya lifestyle live low-income meelas middle middle-class modern national dress Neha Vora neighborhood neighbors neoliberal non-Emiratis noncitizens old Dubai Osella police privileged public spaces Raisa residents safety sanitized Satwa Saudi Saudi Arabia sense of loss shaabiya shopping malls similar social media social norms society South Asian spectacle spectacular city spectacular development spectacular spaces Temporary Cities tion Twitter user University Press upper-middle-class Urban wearing Western woman