ancient cities

282 Fujita, Masahisa
Indeed, many of the industrialized nations of the
former periphery and semiperiphery countries
have seen a decline of rural and small-town populations,
leaving behind a fourth world in the urban
fringe that is similar to the fourth world of the
inner city: All of these areas share a common fate
because they have become structurally irrelevant
to global capital accumulation.
Some have cautioned against the assumption
that economic restructuring within the less developed
countries produces a fourth world that is
excluded from the global capitalist system. While
these countries may be characterized by economic
stagnation, increasing marginality, and potential
for social upheaval, such a model does not recognize
the important ways that these countries remain
integrated within the global system. Gavin Shatkin
suggests that these countries are linked by the diffusion
of new technologies, regional economic
change, and changes in the flow of information
and people. Indeed, in many of the less developed
countries, we see an urban region that is linked to
the world system through information networks,
financial investment, population flows, and the
like. It is the asymmetric nature of these flows that
reminds us of the former colonial world system
(flows of labor from the Philippines to developed
nations, flows of capital from developmental agencies
to Phnom Penh, and the like) and results in the
expansion of the fourth world to what Mike Davis
has called a world of slums. Often these people are
linked by cell phone technologies and the World
Wide Web to others around the globe, complicating
our models of a new informational society just
as the fourth world (places left behind in the new
global economy) becomes more noticeable in metropolitan
regions around the world.
Ray Hutchison
See also Castells, Manuel; Globalization; Urban Theory;
World-Systems Perspective
Further Readings
Castells, Manuel. 1998. The Information Age: Economy,
Society, and Culture. Vol. 3, End of the Millenium.
Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
———. 2000. “The Rise of the Fourth World.” Pp.
348–54 in The Global Transformations Reader: An
Introduction to the Globalization Debate, edited by
David Held and Anthony McGraw. Cambridge, UK:
Polity Press.
Davis, Mike. 2007. Planet of Slums. London: Verso.
Hall, Sam. 1975. The Fourth World: The Heritage of the
Arctic and its Destruction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Keyder, Cagler. 2005. “Globalization and Social
Exclusion in Istanbul.” International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research 29(1):124–34.
Manuel, George and Michael Posluns. 1974. The Fourth
World: An Indian Reality. Don Mills, ON:
Collier-Macmillan Canada.
Neuwirth, Robert. 2006. Shadow Cities: A Billion
Squatters, a New Urban World. New York:
Routledge.
Shatkin, Gavin. 1998. “‘Fourth World’ Cities in the
Global Economy: The Case of Phnom Penh,
Cambodia.” International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research 22(3):378–93.
Whitaker, Ben, ed. 1973. The Fourth World: Victims of
Group Oppression. New York: Schocken Books.
Fu j i t a, ma s a H i s a
Born in Yamaguchi prefecture (Japan) in 1943,
Masahisa Fujita completed a BS in civil engineering
at Kyoto University in 1966. Soon after,
he went to the Department of Regional Science
of the University of Pennsylvania, where he
graduated with his PhD in 1972. He then
became a professor of regional science there.
After two decades, he joined the faculty of
the Institute of Economic Research of Kyoto
University, where he remained until 2006. Fujita
is the recipient of the 1983 Tord Palander Prize,
the 1998 Walter Isard Award in Regional
Science, and the First Alonso Prize awarded
with Paul Krugman.
Out of more than 100 scientific books and
articles, some major contributions emerge. The
core of urban economics is the monocentric city
model of which Fujita’s urban economic theory
provides the definitive exposition. The main weakness
of this model was the lack of explanation for
the existence of a central business district. Fujita
argued that cities are concentrations of agents of
different types (mainly, firms and households).
The centripetal force is communications among
firms, which permit the exchange of information: