If it is obvious that the world is not flat, the question is: For whom does it appear flat? Countless world-flattening globalisers move every day from hotel lobbies to airport limos to first-class lounges to business-class seats on intercontinental airliners, laptops in hand, uploading, outsourcing, offshoring as they travel, adjusting the air conditioning as they go. They are changing the world, these modern nomads, and they are, in many ways, improving it — depending on one’s definition of progress.

But are these “globals” invariably agents of access and integration? Are they lowering the barriers to worldwide participation or raising the stakes against it? Have their influence and effect overpowered the imperatives of place, so that their very mobility symbolizes a growing irrelevance of location — and geography, in the view of more than one observer, is history?

Not yet. Even as the powers of economic globalisation homogenise urban skylines from Berlin to Bangkok, another force is transforming the world, dividing it into a core of haves and a periphery of have-less or have-nots. It is not difficult to visualize this global core, even without a map: It is anchored by North America and flanked by Europe across the Atlantic to the east and Japan and Australia across the Pacific to the west. It contains the vast majority of the urban nodes of globalisation, including the three dominant “world cities” of London, New York and Tokyo; its economic power is defined by data such as this: With about 15 per cent of the world’s population, the core earns some 75 per cent of all annual income. Population growth in the global core is far below the world average; the national populations of many countries of the periphery continue to burgeon. Over the remainder of this century, the world may add more than 3 billion to its present numbers (of about 7 billion); 90 per cent of this natural growth will occur in the periphery.

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