Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai

by Rana AlMutawa

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.
 

293 pages, Hardcover

Published January 9, 2024

Reviews

[Mariam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took my time reading this book, took breaks when I felt I lost focus, but finished it regardless, and enjoyed every page of it. While it’s a definite 5 star from me, I feel I would’ve enjoyed it more if I was more aware of Dubai’s urban spaces, places, and people. So I’d highly encourage people familiar with Dubai to read it, especially who grew up there, I feel they’d relate to it more.

[Fatma Behzad · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book highlighted perfectly my own experiences as well as my peers as Dubai residents. While I did not know what to expect starting the book, I am so beyond grateful for this piece of academia, particularly coming from a GCC national, in highlighting many aspects of Dubai citizen and residents and their perspectives. Many thoughts and opinions I had both before reading this book and during the read, I immediately found discussed in subsequent chapters!

A lot of literature will often dehumanize Dubai residents as helpless standby-ers, and even clump them into a group-think mentality, assuming there is no diversity of thought or opinion. This book, beyond serving its objective of showing the adaptive nature of residents in a spectacular cosmopolitan, also serves as a spotlight to the lives of the average folk, displaying the individual personalities, characters, and stories. This in and of itself helps humanize and assign individuality to an otherwise brushed off population.

I am also very grateful at the inclusion and discussions of subsections of emarati citizens usually overlooked in discussions of the Emirati milieu, which I again don’t think would have executed and discussed with such accuracy and understanding had the author not been Emirati/khaleeji herself.

Overall I think this book is incredibly important in the understanding of Dubai and how its residents navigate within it, and I am both joyful and proud to see this wonderful contribution into the academic space.

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

good writing & the presentation of research was amazing but the argument she tries to construct throughout keeps falling through. alot of the research presented is not meaningfully engaged with. her defenses against of some of the dominant contributions in the field are arguments that are not mutually exclusive with the arguments she contests so it’s difficult to see what point she is trying to make. nice read but hardly persuasive.

[Elroy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is compulsory reading for anyone wanting to understand glitzy Dubai beyond what is found on Google and the tourist brochures....

The author is a female Emirati researcher/ academic. In many ways the book is an "insider's perspective", however there is a fair amount of objectivity, critical self-reflection and even latent self-critique.

The ethnographic findings and interviews with countless interlocutors are highly engaging and illuminating. For me this was the highlight of the book. The empirical and ethnographic focus of the book is mainly on middle-upper class (citizen) Emiratis. This is both a strength and a major qualification when drawing conclusions about "Dubai in its totality".

Conceptually the book appears to be focussed on debunking binaries within the Dubai context, e.g. authenticity/ inauthenticity, real/ fake etc. The book also seeks to go beyond, what the author refers to as the "triptych of oppressed, supporters and resisters" framework, which is often widely used to understand Dubai's inhabitant's (residents, expats and citizens) relationship to the city. In this regard, the central argument (finding) of the book is that "adaptive agency" is the main tool utilised by Dubai's inhabitants to live, work, play (and make sense of) etc. in the city.

For me, since this is a serious piece of research and academia on adaptive agency, I would have expected a more expansive discussion and rigorous debate on the "Theory of Adaptation/ Adaptive Agency" in the introductory chapters.

I kept asking myself a range of persistent questions: what is new about this theory (given that in all cities people adapt, support, benefit, resist and are oppressed? This is Urban Planning 101) How does this theory relate to the socio-political theory of dialectics? What is the relationship and hierarchy between adaptation, acquiescence, support, resistance and oppression? Are there Darwinian roots to the approach adopted by the book? Or was this classic academic tiptoeing and post-modern eclecticism? Or the elephant in the room... does the adaptive agency lens makes the book more accessible and palatable to readers, especially the primary ethnographic demographic of this book?

The honesty and verbalised angst (in places) of the author is refreshing. The author recognises that this book focusses on a minority (less than 15% or 10%) of Dubai's inhabitants. It makes the reader (like me) wonder what a similar book with a different demographic focus would find, e.g. on "South Asian bachelors" and other low-income workers in Dubai.

(PS: the reference to - and inspiration from- Nandini Kochar's work, as a young Indian female photographer in Dubai, is notable!)

Oh, this book is sadly not found in Kinokuniya (the largest bookshop in Dubai!)

The book is highly recommended and well-written!