Introduction

Urban geographers are making important contributions to the analysis of the material and symbolic aspects of these late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century spatial transformations. This book highlights such work by considering several themes that researchers actively engage in their work, such as: globalization and transnationalism; economic restructuring; governance, urban politics, and inequality; social differentiation of urban space; spatial form and symbolism; and the influence of technologies. It begins the collection with a separate section of articles generally viewed as works that inspired and organized urban geography in its development. By bringing women explicitly into the study of urban geographies, researchers questioned how cities’ spatial organization affected women’s lives and how urban development itself reflected and reinforced society’s assumptions about women. There have also been calls to “reimagine” the city – that is, to engage, in a much more sustained and systematic way than in the past, with the complexity of the city.