Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai

by Rana AlMutawa

Overview

Everyday 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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520395053
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	01/09/2024
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Rana AlMutawa is Assistant Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University Abu Dhabi.
 

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments 

Introduction 
1. (In)Authenticity in Brand Dubai 
2. Negotiating Belonging in Dubai’s Glitzy, Neoliberal Spaces 
3. Globalization and Diversity at a Cosmopolitan Crossroads 
4. An Appropriately Modern City 
5. The Costs and Benefits of Safety in Sanitized Spaces 
Conclusion 

Notes 
Bibliography 
Index

Editorial Reviews

AlMutawa challenges familiar narratives projected onto the city. Dubai is not considered ‘authentically’ cosmopolitan because it is highly segregated. . . yet many parts of the city (including its malls) bring together a cross-sample of those across the class–race axis.”

Wasafiri