ancient cities

280 Fourth World
a central forum and its attendant monumental
buildings.
Gregory S. Aldrete
See also Agora; Piazza; Public Realm; Rome, Italy
Further Readings
Aldrete, Gregory. 2004. Daily Life in the Roman City:
Rome, Pompeii, and Ostia. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Coarelli, F. 1983 and 1985. Il Foro Romano, 2 vols.
Rome: Quasar.
Favro, Diane. 1988. “The Roman Forum and Roman
Memory.” Places 5(1):17–23.
Frischer, Bernard. 2004. “The Digital Roman Forum
Project of the Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory:
Remediating the Traditions of Roman Topography.”
Berkeley: University of California, Los Angeles,
CulturaVirtual Reality Laboratory. Retrieved May 15,
2009 (http://www.cvrlab.org/research/images/
FrischerWorkshopPaperIllustratedWeb.htm).
Machado, Carlos. 2006. “Building the Past: Monuments
and Memory in the Roman Forum.” Pp. 157–92 in
Social and Political Life in Late Antiquity, edited by
W. Bowden, C. Macaho, and A. Gutteridge. Leiden,
the Netherlands: Brill.
Steinby, E., ed. 1995. “Forum Romanum.” In Lexicon
Topographicum Urbis Romae, Vol. 2. Rome: Quasar.
Thomas, Edmund. 2007. Monumentality and the Roman
Empire: Architecture in the Antonine Age. Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press.
Fo u r t H Wo r l d
Fourth world refers to those persons, groups, and
places left behind in the process of globalization
and resulting changes in urban and regional
systems—including urban and nonurban spaces in
both developed countries and the developing
world. The term has an interesting history, emerging
from an earlier discourse that highlighted the
social exclusion of indigenous and minority populations,
then highlighting increased poverty and
social exclusion in third world nations, and now
finding its place within urban studies with new
and significant meanings.
The generic label fourth world begins in the
development literature that described different
regions of the world according to the geopolitics of
the postwar twentieth century: The first world
included Europe and the United States, and the
second world included the Soviet Union and satellite
countries in Eastern Europe. The Third World
included all other countries, a diverse collection of
countries with high levels of industrial development
as well as less developed economies, including
nations in Africa, South America, and Asia that
are commonly thought of as the developing world.
Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory
placed countries within a three-tier system of core,
semiperiphery, and periphery based on their level
of incorporation within the global capitalist economy;
nations might move upward or downward
within this system as resources and obstacles
within the world capitalist system change.
While fourth world refers to concepts from and
thereby fits within the general development literature,
it has substantially different meanings. In
North America, the fourth world emerged from the
growing Native American activism over environmental
issues and the development of American
Indian Studies programs in North America. George
Manuel and Michael Poslum’s The Fourth World:
An Indian Reality argued that the fourth world
contains “many different cultures and lifeways,
some highly tribal and traditional, some highly
urban and individual” and included aboriginal
populations across the globe, including Native
Americans as well as aboriginal groups in Australia
and New Zealand and the Sami in Scandinavia.
The Dene Declaration, signed by some 300 delegates
to the Indian Brotherhood at Fort Simpson
(Northwest Territories) in 1975, stated, “We the
Dene are part of the Fourth World. And as the
peoples and nations of the world have come to recognize
the existence and rights of those peoples
who make up the Third World the day must come
and will come when the nations of the Fourth
World will come to be recognized and respected.”
A contemporaneous United Nations study of
fourth-world populations highlighted the social
exclusion of included ethnic and religious minorities
around the globe, including aborigines in
Australia, ethnic minorities in Africa, and religious
minorities in the Soviet Union. Within this framework,
in other words, the people of the fourth
world may share common status of social exclusion
and denial of basic rights due to their condition of