Everyday Life in the Spectacular City

aw_product_id: 
37105553225
merchant_image_url: 
merchant_category: 
Books
search_price: 
25.00
book_author_name: 
Rana AlMutawa
book_type: 
Paperback
publisher: 
University of California Press
published_date: 
09/01/2024
isbn: 
9780520395060
Merchant Product Cat path: 
Books > Politics, Society & Education > Sociology & anthropology > Anthropology > Social & cultural anthropology & ethnography
specifications: 
Rana AlMutawa|Paperback|University of California Press|09/01/2024
Merchant Product Id: 
9780520395060
Book Description: 
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.  

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