ABSTRACT
Although this book is essentially an empirical work, in this final part I free myself from the strict evidential exigencies that have characterized the arguments thus far. Suppositions are speculations. I hope mine are not ‘mere suppositions’ but, rather, informed conjectures not wholly divorced from the evidence and models presented above. But I do reserve the right to go far beyond what I can safely infer from the global urban analyses. Effectively the latter have provided cross-sectional analyses about one segment of human activities at the start of the twenty-first century. In Part IV I develop an argument that this small time segment may represent a harbinger of a much broader shift in human organization. In this way I engage the debate concerning the meaning of contemporary globalization and provide a little new gloss on some existing ideas.
