Much of the scholarship on economic reform in the Middle East has focused on the free trade zones, the effects of privatization and market liberalization, and shifting sites and practices of patronage. In this paper I argue that these changes in the economic and cultural spaces in the urban spaces of Cairo and Amman have created not only well-documented exclusions, but also new sites of engagement. New sites of leisure allow some middle- and lower middle-class citizens to insert themselves into (relatively) new cosmopolitan leisure economy in ways that entail self-conscious negotiations with sites of cultural production and cultural capital. At the same time, these citizens are being directed away from politics and toward a consumptive orientation supportive of neoliberal economic reforms (and the authoritarian political regimes that support them). While much of the literature on the cultural effects of neoliberal economic reforms has emphasized exclusions and disenfranchisement; my focus here is on the ways in which lines of exclusion are being crossed, creating opportunities (as well as new forms of exclusions) for those who might seem to initially find themselves on the losing side of neoliberal economic reforms. Thus a goal of this paper is not to explain authoritarianism per se, but to examine the specific practices, at the micro level, that unwittingly support authoritarian regimes. Through a comparative study of Cairo and Amman--two metropolitan areas of considerably different scope--I aim to reveal the micro-effects of authoritarian practices, using ethnographic methods focused on the spaces that allow citizens to "cross" spaces that are differently affected by legal codes as well as police surveillance.