Introduction

‘The modern individual is, above all else, a mobile human being’, Richard Sennett claims in his 1994 book Flesh and Stone (p. 255f.) – at that time this still meant moving from one locality to another in a rather physical sense. More than 20 years later mobility has changed and even expanded from physical means to others including the virtual and imagined (see Büscher and Urry, 2009). These are parts of an accelerating transformation process of societies adapting to the current use of new transport systems, telecommunications, and information media that convey what Harvey (1989) described as ‘time-space compression’.