Everyday Life In The Spectacular City

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.

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.

Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology--to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

DIVThis study analyzes a popular festival and vigilante lynching, examining them as a form of political spectacle performed by improverished people who want to gain access to the potential benefits of citizenship in a modern city./div

Spectacular City presents the work of some 30 leading photographers of the urban landscape, an international group with a particularly strong Dutch representation. Its artists find an almost extraterrestrial beauty in liminal urban spaces, sites in transition. And in recent years their work has offered a whole new way of seeing, among other subjects, ports and industrial zones: like some other Cinderellas featured here, these neighborhoods were once considered ugly but have now acquired such a fresh visual appeal that they have come to serve as inspiration for new public spaces and buildings. The diversity of the assembled work reveals the complexity and versatility of both the urban environment and the photographers, who include Olivo Barbieri, Oliver Boberg, Balthasar Burkhard, Vincenzo Castella, Edgar Cleijne, Stéphane Couturier, Thomas Demand, Andreas Gefeller, Geert Goiris, Andreas Gursky, Naoya Hatakeyama, Todd Hido, Dan Holdsworth, Francesco Jodice, Aglaia Konrad, Luisa Lambri, Ine Lamers, Ze Tsung Leong, Armin Linke, Taiji Matsue, Karin Apollonia Müller, Bas Princen, Thomas Ruff, Frank van der Salm, Heidi Specker, Jules Spinatsch, Thomas Struth, Michael Wesely and Edwin Zwakman.

DIVThis study analyzes a popular festival and vigilante lynching, examining them as a form of political spectacle performed by improverished people who want to gain access to the potential benefits of citizenship in a modern city./div