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This chapter explores the contours of the space created by networks and focuses on the geography of the Internet itself. It then evaluates the influence of information, communication, and technologies on the spatial transformation of cities and regions. It also addresses a myth of time — the end of the workplace due to telecommuting — by reporting the actual developments in metropolitan mobility. It considers potential changes caused by the Internet in the home environment, and in the relationship to public space. Lastly, it assesses the social differentiation induced by this networking geography.

Predicting the outcome of spatial transformations, such as viewpoint changes, is very important in everyday life. It has been shown that it is very difficult to point to where an object would be as if one is facing a different direction (perspective change problem). These difficulties are often attributed to the imagination process that is mentally rotating oneself or the object array. This chapter investigates this hypothesis by varying the ‘imagination time’ before the target is given. It presents two experiments showing that when using a pointing task, there is no improvement in performance even when the participants are allowed to complete the ‘imagination’ process first. In contrast, when using a verbal reporting task, participants are able to describe the egocentric angles of the imagined target location as quickly as the no-imagination control condition. These results suggest that participants are able to transform and maintain a representation of the new perspective, but this representation is accessible to a verbal system that subserves the verbal response task, but not to an action system that subserves the pointing task. Thus, functional features defined with respect to one cognitive system may not generalize to another cognitive system.

The pyramids in Giza have constituted a dramatic point of interest for colonial and postcolonial tourism, Western cultural imaginations, national-development and state-promotion projects, as well as global financial interests. The two stories—the first of the town of Giza and its surrounding villages' integration into a global metropolis, and the second of the Pyramids as an icon of colonialism and then global tourism—structure this chapter's exploration of the Giza cityscape. This chapter introduces two Giza spaces—the Pyramids Plateau, and the small lower-class urban quarter of al-Tayyibin—to illustrate local and global spatial dynamics. Juxtaposing the two spaces, the chapter shows how spatial transformations and everyday practices rooted in disparate local and global historical, political, and social agendas and trajectories differently shaped two spaces. With the reorganization of global capitalism, sites like the Giza pyramids increasingly eluded merely local control and came to cater to global politics and financial interests.

The Maya were highly organized before the arrival of the Spanish—especially prior to but also after the demise of the Mayapán confederacy in the mid-thirteenth century. Given the accumulated experience of the Spanish and the missionaries in New Spain and elsewhere, and given what they found in Yucatán, there is no question that they recognized that the Maya were already living in a complex society. But the kind of order that interested the Spaniards was different, and it required both a simplification and recasting of the indigenous political geography. This chapter spells out the main lines of spatial transformation entailed by the reducción. To be reducido was above all to live in a stable place, in which things were done in their proper settings and people behaved in ways appropriate to those settings. The concept of propriety here derives from policía, itself derived linguistically from polis “town.” Thus, it is unsurprising that the order imposed by reducción revolved around the pueblo “town”.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the history of Republican Beijing. The book brings together the political, economic, social, and cultural forces in Beijing life involved in the transformation of the old imperial capital, and its recreation as the cultural city of modern China. The chapter describes the spatial transformations, the city's material life, and representations of the city. It stresses the importance of the years of Nationalist rule in Beijing's history.

The introduction provides a theoretical framework for the book’s examination of the intersection between public memory, public space and urban transformation. In South Africa, as elsewhere, the politics of memory are inherently spatialised, both through physical traces in landscapes and through the structure and layout of urban and public spaces. The introductory chapter makes a case for the inherent intertwining of twenty-first-century spatial transformation in cities, and the transformation (and contestation) of the politics of public memory. Through this discussion, the introduction outlines the ways in which the city can be read as a form of archive, and how this reading is helpful for understanding public memory’s appearances and disappearances in urban public space. This chapter also makes the case for the study of these questions in the context of this particular post-apartheid city in the twenty-first century, and provides the rationale for Nelson Mandela Bay as an appropriate site through which to examine these questions and their broader continental and global relevance. It positions the city’s recent history in the context of South African and global politics, and argues for the value of examining and understanding this period through the lens of public memory and urban transformation.

This chapter explores the “invisible terrain” occupied by new Latina/o migrants in East Los Angeles and Charlotte, North Carolina. In East L.A., established Latina/o residents and new migrants inhabit separate worlds that rarely intersect: the latter rarely frequent the public and commercial spaces of Latina/o East L.A. because they lack the money and social connections to do so. In Charlotte, most of the Latina/o population consists of such new migrants, who have moved into aging auto-oriented suburban landscapes no longer attractive to middle-class residents, and who maintain a very similar way of life to that of the migrants in L.A. Even here, however, migrant communities have initiated spatial transformations: vendors' trucks, for example, are revitalizing nondescript, marginal suburban spaces, though such transformations are often resisted by civic officials as evidence of urban decline or nonconformity to local regulations.

This chapter explores how intellectuals—in the Arabic press and in the Arabic theater—reached to the spatial and sensorial transformation of Cairo and the work of the khedivate. The intellectual production within or associated with government circles constituted a “gentle revolution.” The gentle revolution was an attempt to make patriotism the official ideology of the khedivate. This involved the use of the learned Arabic language as official language of the khedivate and the retelling of Muslim history of Egypt as an Arab narrative. This new Muslim memory has to compete with and conform the European aesthetics of Ismail Pasha and the actual Ottoman belonging of Egypt. Spatial transformation brought politics to be performed in front of the powerful. Thus, the language as a public representation had to be adjusted.

This chapter examines the impact of the introduction and use of specific legal and municipal instruments on communal and urban spatial transformations by focusing on the communal real estate of the Parsis (Indian Zoroastrians), one of Mumbai's microcommunities. It begins by presenting a historical background on the Parsis' migration from Gujarat to Bombay and how they became the largest private landowners in Mumbai. It then considers the Parsis' incorporation in a governing charitable trust, the Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP), and describes Parsi trust housing as a unique scape of housing in the city. By analyzing the case of the movement of the Parsis from Bombay to Mumbai, this chapter highlights the consequences for the Parsi community of the shifting structure and ethics of the communal trust.