This title was first published in 2000: This text demonstrates the mutual effects of, and interconnections between, globalization, urbanization and rural stagnation, both theoretically and empirically. It places its comprehensive empirical investigation on two levels of urbanization - the peri-urban and the fully urbanized areas - and includes the analysis of the rural conditions into the context of the Southern African region, and also into the context of global processes in an historical and interdisciplinary perspective. The text analyzes the magnitude of the two gaps and the process of social change between the three areas objectively, by showing the changing social interaction patterns, the differences in housing and other socio-economic variables, and subjectively, through showing the judgement of the people of these variables the degree of satisfaction and depression. As the majority of variables reveal poverty, the root causes for it in Mozambique, Africa and the Third World are analyzed and aspects of an alternative development and an alternative globalization are presented.