Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai By Rana AlMutawa. University of California Press. $29.95. February 2024. ISBN: 0520395069

Ambient Anomie in the Virtualised Landscape? Autonomy, Surveillance and Flows in the 2020 Streetscape

Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai

Introduction of women’s ego-documents (diaries) into scientific use as is an urgent task of gender anthropology and history of everyday life. 179 diaries of the surgeon Zinaida Sedelnikova, found in the State Archive of the Volgograd Region, are a comprehensive documentary source for studying women’s everyday life in one of the cities of the Middle Volga region. It allows us to reveal features of the daily life of a non-capital city through the prism of female perception. The authors set themselves the task of analyzing in detail a document that reflected the everyday life of a city dweller in a non-capital city in the Middle Volga region that was reviving after the war. In the course of the work, historical-comparative, biographical (biography as case analysis), aggregative methods have been used. The author of diaries lived for 60 years in Volgograd, studied and worked there as a doctor. Her way of thinking, value system, everyday practices have interested the participants of a collective project for studying the characteristics of Russian female social memory. The records dating from 1951 to 1969 (notebooks no. 35–85) depict professional, home, family, everyday, and festive life of the Soviet provincial city in its repeatability and rhythm. The diaries contain detailed descriptions of foraging (food and non-food products) in the provincial Soviet city, housing conditions, household life (cleaning methods, simple recipes preserved in oral tradition or borrowed from newspapers and magazines are listed), impressions of leisure activities, relationships with relatives and friends. An emotional, sometimes poetic description of events (the author rhymed and wrote down poems in her diary) is revealed through the prism of female perception. This allows us recreate the provincial female life; photographs, newspaper clippings, calendars, telegrams, letters, theater booklets, event tickets, shreds of fabrics, herbarium present the details of everyday life and help to analyze the identity of a women from amongst the intellectual elite of the Soviet city of the 1950–1960s.

In the decades before the U.S. Civil War, the city of Boston evolved from a dilapidated, haphazardly planned, and architecturally stagnant provincial town into a booming and visually impressive metropolis. In an effort to remake Boston into the "Athens of America," neighborhoods were leveled, streets straightened, and an ambitious set of architectural ordinances enacted. However, even as residents reveled in a vibrant new landscape of landmark buildings, art galleries, parks, and bustling streets, the social and sensory upheaval of city life also gave rise to a widespread fascination with the unseen. Focusing his analysis between 1820 and 1860, Justin T. Clark traces how the effort to impose moral and social order on the city also inspired many—from Transcendentalists to clairvoyants and amateur artists—to seek out more ethereal visions of the infinite and ideal beyond the gilded paintings and glimmering storefronts. By elucidating the reciprocal influence of two of the most important developments in nineteenth-century American culture—the spectacular city and visionary culture—Clark demonstrates how the nineteenth-century city is not only the birthplace of modern spectacle but also a battleground for the freedom and autonomy of the spectator.

A theoretical-methodological reflection must be situated at the beginning of any historical approach, with the aim of individualizing the discipline of the history of everyday (medieval) life and differentiating it as an independent branch of research.* The most important aspects of the investigation consist in: a) formulating clear questions and b) defining the goals of knowledge/understanding, to eliminate the risk of ending up with a simple collection of anecdotes – which, while undeniably captivating, cannot be considered science, and, consequently, becomes part of literature. In its elementary form, daily life is a simple manipulation of certain constants – the environment, people and things, understood through the daily repetition of certain activities, which become habits and are then performed mechanically. It is often stated that the history of everyday life does not have its own method, and it follows the analysis grids of history, more precisely of its auxiliary disciplines. Moreover, the history of everyday life remains dependent on the help of other sciences. In this context, the research is interdisciplinary, involving most of the auxiliary or frontier sciences of history: history of law, archaeology, literature and philology, music and art history, historical geography and ethnography, etc. Research schedule and analysis grid. Based on the historiographic documentation, the theoretical-methodological excursion and the identification of the potential and the limits of the available sources, the perspective that this study proposes is that of a research program dedicated to the reconstruction of the history of everyday life in the late medieval Transylvanian urban centres. The proposed approach is organized into three distinct sections: a) that of the recomposing of frames and the dynamics of daily urban life; b) that of revealing the fundamental structures of everyday life in cities and c) that of identifying the challenges and solutions assumed by the day-to-day existence of individuals, groups and the urban community. *The chosen methodological model has been adopted and modified according to the analysis-interpretation grid proposed by Gerhard Jaritz, Zwischen Augenblick und Ewigkeit. Einführung in die Alltagsgeschichte des Mittelalters (Wien, Graz, Köln: Böhlau 1989), 15-26. Rezumat. Reflexia teoretic-metodologică trebuie să stea la începutul oricărui demers istoric, având ca scop individualizarea disciplinei istoriei vieţii cotidiene (medievale) şi delimitarea acesteia ca ramură independentă a cercetării.* Cele mai importante aspecte ale investigaţiei constau în: a) formularea de întrebări clare şi b) definirea scopurilor cunoaşterii/înţelegerii, pentru eliminarea riscului de a realiza o simplă culegere de anecdote – care poate fi foarte interesantă, însă nu mai poate fi apreciată drept ştiinţă, ci devine literatură. În forma sa elementară, viaţa cotidiană este o simplă manipulare a unor constante – mediu înconjurător, oameni şi lucruri, înţelese prin repetarea zilnică a unor activităţi, care devin obişnuinţă şi sunt îndeplinite apoi mecanic. Se afirmă adeseori că istoria vieţii cotidiene nu are o metodă proprie, urmând grilele de analiză ale istoriei, respectiv ale disciplinelor auxiliare acesteia. De asemenea, istoria vieţii cotidiene rămâne obligată ajutorului altor ştiinţe. În acest context, cercetarea este una interdisciplinară, implicând majoritatea ştiinţelor auxiliare sau de frontieră ale istoriei: istoria dreptului, arheologia, literatura şi filologia, muzica şi istoria artei, geografia istorică şi etnografia, etc. Programul de cercetare şi grila de analiză. În baza documentării istoriografice, a excursului teoretic-metodologic şi a identificării potenţialului şi a limitelor surselor disponibile, perspectiva pe care acest studiu îl propune este aceea a unui program de cercetare dedicat reconstituirii istoriei vieţii cotidiene în centrele urbane ale Transilvaniei medievale târzii într-o abordare structural-tripartită: a) cea a recompunerii cadrelor şi a dinamicii vieţii cotidiene urbane; b) cea a relevării structurilor fundamentale ale vieţii de zi cu zi din oraşe şi c) cea a identificării provocărilor şi soluţiilor presupuse de existenţa de zi cu zi a indivizilor, grupurilor şi comunităţii urbane. *Modelul metodologic avut în vedere este preluat şi adaptat după grila de analiză-interpretare propusă de către Gerhard Jaritz, Zwischen Augenblick und Ewigkeit. Einführung in die Alltagsgeschichte des Mittelalters (Wien, Graz, Köln: Böhlau 1989), 15-26. Cuvinte-cheie: istoria vieţii cotidiene, istorie urbană, saşi ardeleni, arheologie şi cultură materială medievală târzie şi premodernă, Transilvania medievală târzie şi premodernă Article: history; Received: 12.12.2023; Revised: 23.12.2023 Accepted: 29.12.2023; Available online: 30.01.2024

The period the High Middle Ages was a basic in the process European urbanization. During this time there was the formation a new way life in Europe and England. This way life was most attractive. That is why the most people in the world now lives in cities. The British were the first urban nation. In medieval England we can investigate the characteristic features everyday life urban residents through original sources. Since the High Middle Ages until now remained only three anonymous works urban literature England High Middle Ages written in Middle English language – Siriz, Of the Fox and the Wolf and Land Cockayne. The earliest among Middle English fabliau is Land Cockayne. It is conserved in a single copy, which is now found in the British Library (manuscript Harley 913, between 1250 and 1315). In the story we can separate four parts: comparison with the Christian Paradise; describing the country and the abbey there; the flights monks and their shameful life; an instruction how get this paradise. A very valuable resource, which is analyzed in this article, is Sirith. The manuscript the fabliau is Digby 86 the Bodleian library in Oxford (dates the second half the thirteenth century). 450 lines the poetic text narrating the adventures Wilekin in attaining love Margery, a wife a merchant. This ability Dame Siriz (neither fortune-teller, nor simply smart women) helps the hero. The fabliau Of the Fox and the Wolf was widely known in medieval England (written in second half the thirteenth century). It was the English version the story Fox Renard. The manuscript the humorous story is the same as the Siriz. Studying the Middle fabliaux XIII century we discover a number problems relating the everyday life townspeople High Middle England. The features the chronotope everyday life English cities during the period were accuracy and wellregulation life. The locations scenes in the middle English fabliaux are clear for audience, there are no necessary characterize it. Detailing the places leads confusion in the Land Cockayne. Cities include the suburbs – the abode monks, the outskirts the forest, suburban roads, rivers and so on. There are no description the walls the city. The urban area is a part the nature. Important elements the the city was churches, cathedrals. It were described in fabliaux very vividly. In the vernacular fabliaux timeframes are conventional: nizt and dai, to nizt, monizer, monidai, com the time, Zurstendai and others. Calculating the time was designated by a bell. The level material culture the town-livers Medieval Albion very high. The house is very comfortable one. The daily life was concentrated around the house. That is why the subject the fabliau focused around house too. Apartment divided into several areas – hall and rooms. Particular attention is paid bed in the Middle English fabliaux. Obviously they covered by textiles, which also decorated the walls. This was a way for indicate a wealth home owners, their status in society, as well as keeping a space hygiene. A characteristic feature the fabliaux is the lack or maximum brevity descriptions the characters, their clothes and so on. Obviously, the closings the heroes are clear the readers, listeners viewers fabliaux. There are the emphasis on key terms. The main features the description clothing in the Land Cockayne are the absence parasites; colors clothing are clearly associated with a particular layer; luxurious textiles, silk. Also fabliaux provide materials about nudity. Apparently these indecencies are normal, natural for medieval morality. Although these erotic phenomena in medieval literature require further analysis. The feature urban feasting the High Middle Ages in England was the introduction fast into everyday life. The Land describes of fleis, fisse, and rich met, // likfullist þat mei and þe gees, i-rostid on splitte, Fleed þat abbai, God hit wot, // And grediþ, Gees al hote, al hote! In the system feasting the English bourgeoisie in the thirteenth century we view the social hierarchy. Not all products may be available equally all people. That is why in utopia man mai þer-of et inog // Al wiþ rizt and nogt wiþ wog… Special interest medieval town-livers found in spices. And the city created the myth food paradise Cokayne land, where beþ .iiij. willis … tereacle and halwei, baum and ek piement. In general, the earliest examples Middle English fabliaux offer us a vividly picture the everyday life medieval English towns during the High Middle Ages.

Eitt meginmarkmið kennslu í félagsfræði er að hjálpa nemendum að verða læsir á samfélagið, meðal annars með því að þróa með sér félagsfræðilegt innsæi (e. sociological imagination). Kennsluhættir í félagsfræði hafa um langa hríð falist að miklu leyti í því að láta nemendur lesa félagsfræði í stað þess að sjá félagsfræði en sjónræn félagsfræði (e. visual sociology) hefur verið að ryðja sér til rúms á síðustu áratugum sem viðurkennd kennslu- og rannsóknaraðferð innan félagsvísinda. Í þessari grein fjalla ég um það hvernig hægt er að nýta sjónræna félagsfræði, í þessu tilfelli ljósmyndaritgerðir, til þess að þjálfa og þróa félagsfræðilegt innsæi nemenda á efri skólastigum. Til að lýsa þessu greini ég fjórar af mínum eigin ljósmyndum út frá ýmsum hugmyndum, hugtökum og kenningum félagsfræðinnar. Greiningu myndanna er ætlað að vekja athygli á því hvernig nýta má ljósmyndun og ljósmyndaritgerðir til samfélagslegrar greiningar og til kennslu í félagsfræði með hliðsjón af lykilmarkmiðum sem lagt er upp með í aðalnámskrám grunn- og framhaldsskóla.

Profoundly Ordinary:Jon McGregor and Everyday Life Neal Alexander (bio) The fiction of Jon McGregor is distinguished by its attentiveness to the mundane and the profane, the overlooked and the discarded. Provincial and urban in outlook and setting but absorbed in the apparently trivial details of their characters’ lives, his novels and stories discover the extraordinary in ordinary routines or relationships while remaining alert to the alienations that inhere in the very textures of everyday life. Far-reaching changes in the social and economic life of industrial cities in the Midlands and North of England during the postwar period provide a consistent context for his narratives of displacement and impermanence. If this summary implies a primarily documentary aesthetic, then it is also worth noting the extent of McGregor’s formal and stylistic inventiveness, which attests to the continuing influence of modernist aesthetic sensibilities for twenty-first-century fiction.1 Both Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are important touchstones for his narrative techniques, and while McGregor’s fiction can superficially resemble what Zadie Smith calls “lyrical realism,” he eschews that tradition’s “consoling myth” of the authentic self as a “bottomless pool” (75). Less concerned with individual than collective or intersubjective constructions of contemporary reality, McGregor’s novels repeatedly confront the steady erosion of meaningful social relations in postwar Britain by imagining [End Page 720] alternative forms of community in circumstances of anonymity, abandonment, and neglect. His most abiding preoccupation is with the “common” in its dual sense, recorded by Raymond Williams, as what is ordinary and what is shared (Keywords 71). This essay will examine the depiction of everyday life in McGregor’s three novels to date, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), So Many Ways to Begin (2006), and Even the Dogs (2010). It will argue that these texts each encounter certain intractable ethical and representational dilemmas in their efforts to depict the everyday in its very everydayness. Nonetheless, through their imaginative alignments with common people, places, and things, McGregor’s fictions can also be seen to elaborate a representational aesthetic that is fundamentally democratic in its assumptions and implications. Two key features of everyday life are its ubiquity and its insignificance. The latter seems to follow logically from the former: precisely because the events of everyday life happen every day, they become routine, familiar, part of the background rather than the foreground of our experiences. On the other hand, the everyday is also the matrix from which significant experiences arise, a necessary basis for all that is not merely banal. According to Henri Lefebvre, “Everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground” (Critique I 97). This is one of the essential ambiguities of everyday life: although peripheral and unimportant, it is also fundamental or foundational. The significance of the everyday is found in its very insignificance, and the ordinary is a precondition of the extraordinary. Moreover, Michael Sheringham notes the curiously fugitive character of what is closest to hand. “We are immersed in the everyday,” he writes, “yet at the same time cut off from it; nothing we do can be totally reduced to it, nor wholly be detached from it” (146). This duality raises problems of both theoretical definition and literary representation, for it is difficult, if not impossible, to say where everyday life begins and ends. Its parameters must be described from within; yet when approached, it seems to hide itself or recede from view. Such paradoxical characteristics lead Maurice Blanchot to remark that, [End Page 721] by definition, the everyday “escapes” definition: “It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant is without truth, without reality, without secret, but perhaps also the site of all possible signification” (239–40). Once again, everyday life reveals its capacity to deconstruct polarized oppositions, comprehending significance and insignificance, the ordinary and the extraordinary at once. If this brief overview implies a certain consistency to the concept of everyday life as developed in twentieth-century critical theory, however, it is also necessary to note some sharp differences and disagreements. For instance, where Lefebvre’s dialectical approach regards everyday life as an...

The everyday life of Bolshevik elites had remained for many decades a subject avoided in Soviet research both due to the political and ideological restrictions and the scarcity of the source base that formed under their influence. In connection with the recent anthropological turn in the Russian humanities and the keen interest in the history of everyday life (a branch of historical knowledge that focuses on studying the lifestyle of social groups, the evolution of the inner world of individuals and their relationships with various objects and events), we consider it important to draw attention to the history of development of the empirical and historiographical base for research on the life of Bolsheviks in the 1920s–1930s. We qualify the early stage of development of the Soviet historiography (1920s–1940s) as a period of ignoring the topic of the life of elites, which had to do with an unspoken ban put on discussing the living conditions of the top representatives of the Soviet society. We take the second period (1950s–1980s) – the time of the birth of ethnographic interest in the everyday and ordinary in city life – to be the years of “discovery of the topic”. Finally, we associate the third period with the years of stagnation and the beginning of Perestroika. We characterize the active translation of works by foreign researchers on everyday life and the formation of a shared collaboration space with Western scholars (from the early 1990s to the present) as essential prerequisites for understanding the relationship between the social/political transformation of the Soviet/post-Soviet period and the politics of memory, including the memory of the social establishment of the Soviet society during the period of the “great Bolshevik experiment”.

The article discusses everyday life in multicultural cities from a feminist perspective. It aims to engage, theoretically and through empirical research, with everyday life, a concept which brings to the foreground of inquiry a variety of urban experiences and reveals the mutual constitution of gender and place/space. Everyday life is connected to places where different women and men, as individuals, have to live, think and act (in terms of negotiation and/or reconciliation).They construct their everyday life, their personal identities and relations, drawing upon — and, simultaneously, negotiating with — existing macro-level spatial, temporal and discursive structures/meanings. In the context of geographical debates, the study of everyday life starts from the subject's everyday spatio-temporal practices and experiences, aiming to show not only how they are organized by socio-spatial relations and structures, but also how people's (everyday) actions (re)produce and (trans)-form these relations and structures. In this line of thought, space/place is understood as particular constellations of social relations and practices, with local and supralocal determinants, meeting and weaving together in a particular locality. The article will discuss such relations and practices drawing from research in Athens.

This article is about life in Kyiv during World War I. Concern to modern researches we decided to use stories of «simple» people and show how war changed their lives. Through the adaptation to new reality citizens of Kyiv became new social groups and developed new modern reality.Author uses wide researches of the problem reached in Ukraine: O. Reient, G.Kasianov, O.Serdiuk also Wolfram Dornik, Petter Libb, Hannesse Lyaidinger, Alexander Miller.We touched the problem of heroic behaviour of young people, mobilization and consequences of hunger strike during of the first months of WWI. We describe such part of citizenships life like alcohol consumption, reading books, physical training activities.The most important theme of research is migration and refugees, captives. We told about attitude of citizens to them how their appearance affected everyday life of the city.Continuation of hostilities has distorted the life of society and every inhabitant of the country. Attempts by the authorities to improve the way of life, to alleviate the problem of lack of basic necessities, and to prevent devastation and slipping into chaos did not yield the expected results. Against the background of continuous impoverishment of the majority of the population, crime and delinquency flourished. The general tension of the social situation, the uncertainty of the situation of everyone forced everyone to want change, to accelerate it. The presence of some parallels with the current military-political situation in eastern Ukraine suggests that this topic has both cognitive and scientific and practical significance of socio-political nature. In addition, exploring the life of the city’s inhabitants in 1914-1917, we can answer the question of how it happened that the city of Kyiv and its inhabitants were ready to accept the status of the capital of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and later to a neutral perception of the German imperial army streets in March 1918. In our study, we came to this conclusion. The war became more and more difficult with everyday life; the background of everyday hard life, a crisis was ripe in a tired society. The war and the crisis deepened the conflict between the state and the citizens. One of the options for improvement could be to weaken the tsar’s policy on the national question, especially for the residents of the city of Ukrainian and Jewish origin. Playing with Poles, Czechs and Slovaks (most of the latter fought in the Austro-Hungarian army and were prisoners of war), allowing them to create their own, national, military formations directly in the city, and meeting total resistance from the tsarist bureaucracy in their national question only intensified the contradiction. Desiring change and accelerating it, the inhabitants of Kyiv later, due to the lack of cohesion and general fatigue, turned out to be only extras in the scenes of 1917-1921.

The authors conducted a source study of two previously unanalyzed visual sources from the Russian Civil War. These are minute-long newsreel fragments filmed in anti-Bolshevik Omsk in early 1919 by war journalists serving in the expeditionary army contingents of the United States and France. The videos were distributed online but have not received adequate academic interpretation. This work continues the author's research, which has been ongoing for nearly a decade. The sources under study provide valuable factual insight into the everyday political life of Kolchak's capital, clearly illustrating certain official aspects of the stay in Omsk of prominent representatives of the White movement's foreign allies. The sources are linked to the historiography of the issue, leading to the conclusion that this study is relevant and innovative. Its purpose is to analyze the substantive features of these visual sources, taking into account the specific historical context of their origin. The study's source material consists of the newsreel fragments themselves, interpreted through a diverse set of sources (memoirs, periodicals, reference works, and historiographic research). The theoretical foundation of the work is represented by a combination of institutional and anthropological approaches, the principle of systems, and problem-chronological, comparative historical, historical-genetic, source-study, and biographical methods. This methodological approach allowed us to identify common and specific features of the previously studied and currently analyzed film footage, presenting the captured scenes as part of the political culture of white Omsk and linking them to specific historical figures. According to the study's authors, academic specialists' reliance on visual documents of this kind not only facilitates the representation of history in motion. The use of these testimonies of the past plays an important role in overcoming erroneous judgments about the Civil War in eastern Russia and also helps popularize knowledge about this period through the display of visual heritage, accompanied by commentary, at public history venues. This work may be of interest to researchers studying visual history, the interactions between the anti-Bolshevik authorities in eastern Russia and their foreign allies, everyday life in Siberian cities during this period, and local history.

Becoming a Nazi Town reveals the ways in which ordinary Germans changed their cultural lives and their politics from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. Casting the origins of Nazism in a new light, David Imhoof charts the process by which Weimar and Nazi culture flowed into each other. He analyzes this dramatic transition by looking closely at three examples of everyday cultural life in the mid-sized German city of Göttingen: sharpshooting, an opera festival, and cinema. Imhoof draws on individual and community experiences over a series of interwar periods to highlight and connect shifts in culture, politics, and everyday life. He demonstrates how Nazi leaders crafted cultural policies based in part on homegrown cultural practices of the 1920s and argues that overdrawn distinctions between "Weimar" and "Nazi" culture did not always conform to most Germans' daily lives. Further, Imhoof presents experiences in Göttingen as a reflection of the common reality of many German towns beyond the capital city of Berlin.

The Third Revolution

This volume of Research in Urban Sociology derives from the conference ‘Everyday life in the segmented city’ held in July 2010 in Florence, and is composed of a selection of papers originally presented on this occasion. Starting from the epochal assumption that for the first time in human history the majority of the world's population lives in urban environment, the conference gathered a set of presentations dealing with issues of global urbanization, showing a multiplicity of approaches and points of view which we tried to preserve within the limits of this publication. Urbanization is a phenomenon inscribed into globalization process with enormous consequences in the transformation of urban space and the everyday life of citizens: a dynamics which is reflected also in a flourishing analytical discourse that increasingly transcends the boundaries of established urban disciplines. The progressive extension of the urban domain beyond the limits of the city, and across diverse scales, has its corollary in the progressive segmentation of the urban dimension along multiple lines of material, social, economic, cultural and ethnic nature. Here we have chosen the perspective of the everyday to analyse how practices and policy can overcome the spin towards fragmentation and anomy and reinforce social cohesion for a more just and liveable city, endorsing the ‘right to the city’ as postulated by the seminal work of Henri Lefebvre. Although not specifically focused on his work, this collection clearly reveals the fundamental influence of the French philosopher over the knowledge and critique of late modern spatial production (Lefebvre, 1991b), and the net of Lefebvre's concept which connect different papers constitutes an evident subtext to this volume of Research in Urban Sociology. The original structure of the conference foresaw five distinct thematic sections, entitled ‘Right to the city’, ‘Cinematic urbanism’, ‘Governance and planning’, ‘Re-appropriation of urban spaces,’ and ‘Suburbanization and post urban cities’. Ultimately, in composing this volume we decided not to adopt those thematic areas as distinct sections, as many papers demonstrated the interdependence of these topics, escaping a strong separation of the arguments. On the contrary, the five topics recur all along this volume as transversal issues connecting almost all contributions. In the Introduction we aim at retracing those connections, starting from the dialectic evocated by the title between ‘everyday life’ practices of the inhabitants and what has been named here ‘segmented city’ as an epitome of the contemporary city in the age of globalization.