John Friedmann_

John Friedmann (April 16, 1926 – June 11, 2017) was an Honorary Professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and Professor Emeritus at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He was the founding professor of the Program for Urban Planning in the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning at UCLA and served as its head for a total of 14 years between 1969 and 1996. He was born in Vienna, Austria. He obtained a PhD at the University of Chicago in 1955, and then, between 1955 and 1969, worked in Brazil, South Korea, the United States, Venezuela and Chile for academic, government and non-government agencies. In 1966 he developed the core-periphery four-stage model of regional development, explaining that "where economic growth is sustained over long time periods, its incidence works towards a progressive integration of the space economy." Nineteen years later, his article "The World City Hypothesis" generated a stream of research in economic geography, development studies, and planning.