Less Developed:

A Note on the Ordering Of Worlds

First World, Second World, Third World, Fourth.  How we abscind our global society is crucial to how we understand it. The term First World originally denoted wealthy self-proclaimed democracies worried enough about the Soviet Bloc and its allies to slice them off the globe into a Second World.  The Third World, in theory, lay beyond the reach of the checkerboard game of capitalist versus communist — un-aligned and, as French economist Aflred Sauvy argued when he coined the term, unconsidered.

The Third World, he said, has been ignored and despised, and wants to be something. But as François-André Philidor, the great 18th century chess player who called pawns “the soul of chess” might rebut: despised, yes, but ignored, certainly not. Indeed, the Third World often became the stage on which First-Second world struggles were played out, either directly or through covert manipulations affecting the flows of money, resources, and ideology.

Once the Second World dropped out of the picture, these dynamics became even more pronounced.  The Third World was defined not by a political relationship to the First World, but rather, an economic one, as a strategic part of the world market system.  Now, the term Fourth World has arisen to describe those few populations who have not been ‘ushered’ into the global community and remain outside the reach of advancing modernity. Like the Third World, these societies have potential value to the rest of the global community, making the choice euphemism developing more appealing. For those who stand to gain from developing the developing world, viewing the process of modernization as linear and inevitable is advantageous.  The term naturalizes the differences between poorer or ‘backward’ countries, and promotes interference by richer, more ‘advanced’ societies. 

Dependency theorists reject the vocabulary of modernization theory, favoring terms that reveal the advancement of some nations to be directly dependant on the (deliberate) impoverishment of others.  Thus, Andre Gunder Frank’s term underdeveloped, as a transitive, denotes an active process: I underdevelop you[i]. 

Other attempts to standardize a vocabulary for this phenomenon are numerous: Immanual Wallerstein’s World Systems Theory suggests framing the problem in terms of a wealthy core and resource-rich periphery from which goods flow.  Other scholars use politically whitewashed, geographically confused West/East or North/South distinctions, referring to a Western World or a Global South that don’t align with any real latitude or longitude. 

These terms all have shortcomings, and relying on any one system of naming is difficult, particularly when it comes to dissecting complex global conurbations that comprise traits of the modern technocratic city, traditional village structure, and the runaway urbanization which is coming to characterize the 21st century metropolis. And while each of these terms can be appropriate, depending on context, it may be of value to note that ultimately, what is needed is a new term altogether.

As Mike Davis makes clear in Planet of Slums, the rapidly expanding peripheral settlement (barrio, slum, favela) is, or will soon be, the new norm.[ii]  In a place of such overwhelmingly eclectic and changeable conditions, what word applies?  People in fringe settlements and megacities encounter incredibly varied access.  They transcend a hundred seemingly fixed boundaries every day, moving fluidly over differentials of technology, safety, and freedom with every daily activity:

In “(Im)mobilizing Space—Dreaming of Change,” Jennifer Robinson describes these circumstances typically intersect in the South African urban periphery:

 The nurse working in a suburban rest home; the man visiting his lover late at night; night workers waiting in the inner city for the first bus home; men waiting on street corners for casual work; the soldier riding on top of the armoured vehicle watching for stone-throwers; the madam taking her domestic worker (almost) home with her extra baggage, the rent collector walking from house to house, catching up on family news and picking up the rent; the township manager fetching his son after cricket practice at school, driving back to his house on the edge of the black city. . .[iii]

Perhaps the new term that should apply to these conditions is ZEROth World.  

The ZEROth World, despite widespread poverty, holds unprecedented access to the tools that create inclusion in society at all levels.  Technology is being captured, reformed for use by poorer classes, and re-dispersed in the form of cheap laptops and public email stations, specialized cell phone plans, and increasingly accessible mobile internet.  But ZEROth world does not merely denote those cities in former Third World countries that have come to resemble the First World: the industrialized, advertized, transnationalized urban cores whose social, political, and economic links to each other (Hong Kong—Seoul – Mumbai rubbing shoulders with New York—London—Tokyo) are stronger than the links to their own peripheries, for indeed, such global cities are indistinguishable from the First World, proper.i[v] 

Zeroth – an ordinal term borrowed from computer programming – suggests a new world that, like the global city, transcends the boundaries of sovereignty. 

Unlike the global city, though, the ZEROth world may bypass ‘the state’ altogether, in terms of infrastructure (the ubiquity of cells phones and relative lack of landlines in many parts of the world standing testament); economy; and, to be sure, opportunities.  Furthermore, it may be applied to those populations – small but steadily growing – who live the First World but do so, voluntarily or not, outside the typical economic and political structures.  These may include homeless people, back-to-the-landers, squatters, hippies and hobos of all stripes, artists living in converted warehouses, urban homesteaders and more.

Till now, the ZEROth World has been left out of the picture when cities represent themselves, and Johannesburg, is no exception.  The pop-y logo may not be convincing, because we already have an image of Johannesburg emblazoned in our minds: razor wire, closed-circuit TV, ubiquitous corrugated sheet metal.  This is the ZEROth world.  Its inhabitants see crime, know hunger, are fear.  But they also: use the Internet.  Drive Cars.  Buy Coca-Cola.  Watch TV.  And shape what is around them. 

The ZEROth is the world that defies description, blurs the boundaries.  They are up-and-coming and they are drawing their own lines.

[i] John Isbister. Promises Not Kept: The Betrayal of Social Change in the Third World. 3rd ed. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. 1995. 45.

[ii] Mike Davis. Planet of Slums.  New York: Verso.  2006.

[iii] Jennifer Robinson.  “(Im)mobilizing Space—Dreaming of Change,” in Blank____ Architecture, Apartheid and After, catalogue for exhibition by the same name, eds. Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavic.  Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. 1998.  163-4. 

[iv] Saskia Sassen, The Global City.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.