Abstract
During his academic career Milton Santos published approximately 40 scientific works on the so-called Third World. This period of intellectual activity corresponds to the time the geographer was forced to live in an exile that started in France. He mainly wrote about the theme from the point of view of urban agglomerations. To present the reality of these Third World cities, he frequently used figures and empirical studies. He also observed that the dynamism and the expansion of cities in underdeveloped countries depended more on their population growth than on their economy. Milton Santos thought these major cities in the Third World could not be studied as whole systems and his observations led to the elaboration of the theory of the two circuits. The notion, first introduced in the last chapter of Santos’s book Les Villes du Tiers-Monde, was further developed in one of his most accomplished works on the theme: L’Espace Partagé: Les Deux Circuits de l’Economie Urbaine des Pays Sous-Développés. The author identifies the upper circuit as the direct result of a modernization process that drastically changes modes of production and communication, as well as lifestyle and consumption patterns. He understands the lower circuit as a consequence of the same modernization processes, but in a more indirect manner: a circuit that includes people and activities that do not benefit at all, or benefit only partially, from recent technological advancements. However, Santos considers these two circuits closely dependent and operating with one another.
Aurélien Reys, Post-doctoral Researcher, Centre de Coopération International en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD), France; Email: aurelien.reys@cirad.fr.
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Notes
- 1.
In the 1930s a group of French academics were in charge of the inauguration and development of the University of São Paulo’s (USP) teaching activities. Professors involved included Fernand Braudel (history) Pierre Monbeig (geography), Claude Lévi-Strauss (anthropology) and Roger Bastide (sociology).
- 2.
The expression Third World is used for the first time in 1952 by a French demographer, Alfred Sauvy. Originally, the term was employed in reference to the French ‘Third Estate’, in order to designate countries neither aligned with the capitalist nor the communist model. At the time when France was still a monarchy, the Third Estate referred to the common people who were part of neither the nobility nor the clergy.
- 3.
‘The speed with which cities grow and urban populations increase is a generalized phenomenon in underdeveloped countries. This fact is all the more important because it is precisely the Third World cities that are the ones that materialize the will of progress and that are preparing the process of development’ (Santos 1961: 197).
- 4.
He also pointed out in an article on downtown Salvador that the city was not growing due to dynamism, but because of its lack of dynamism (Santos 1958).
- 5.
Book first published in French.
- 6.
Dependency theory is a thesis created by Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel, which argued that underdevelopment is a consequence of historical processes resulting from an economic dependency that deteriorated the terms of trade to the disadvantage of poorer countries.
- 7.
Until the recent publication of Toward an Other Globalization, this was the only book of Santos’s translated into English (see Santos 1979).
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Reys, A. (2017). How Can Santos’s Theory and Concepts Help Us to Better Understand Third World Dynamics and Problems?. In: Melgaço, L., Prouse, C. (eds) Milton Santos: A Pioneer in Critical Geography from the Global South . Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53826-6_4
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