A primate city is a city that is the largest in its country, province, state, or region, and disproportionately larger than any others in the urban hierarchy. A primate city distribution is a rank–size distribution that has one very large city with many much smaller cities and towns and no intermediate-sized urban centers, creating a statistical king effect.
The law of the primate city was first proposed by the geographer Mark Jefferson in 1939. He defines a primate city as being "at least twice as large as the next largest city and more than twice as significant." Aside from size and population, a primate city will usually have precedence in all other aspects of its country's society such as economics, politics, culture, and education. Primate cities also serve as targets for the majority of a country or region's internal migration.
In geography, the phenomenon of excessive concentration of population and development of the main city of a country or a region (often to the detriment of other areas) is called urban primacy or urban macrocephaly.
Measurement Urban primacy can be measured as the share of a country's population that lives in the primate city. Relative primacy indicates the ratio of the primate city's population to that of the second largest in a country or region.
Significance There is debate as to whether a primate city serves a parasitic or generative function. The presence of a primate city in a country may indicate an imbalance in development—usually a progressive core and a lagging periphery—on which the city depends for labor and other resources.Brunn, Stanley, et al. Cities of the World. Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2003 However, the urban structure is not directly dependent on a country's level of economic development.
Many primate cities gain an increasing share of their country's population. This can be due to a reduction in blue-collar population in the hinterlands because of mechanization and automation. Simultaneously, the number of educated employees in white-collar endeavors such as politics, finance, media, and higher education rises. These sectors are clustered predominantly in primate cities where power and wealth are concentrated.
Examples
Some global cities are considered national or regional primate cities. An example of a global city that is also a primate city is Istanbul in Turkey. Istanbul serves as the primate city of Turkey due to the unmatched economic, cultural, and educational influence that the city possesses in comparison to other Turkish cities such as the capital Ankara, İzmir, or Bursa. Likewise, Nairobi, Bangkok, Mexico City, Paris, Cairo, Jakarta, and Seoul have also been described as primate cities of their respective countries. However, not all regions and countries possess a primate city. The United States has never had a primate city on a national level due to the decentralized nature of the country and because the country's second-largest city, Los Angeles, is not far behind the country's largest city, New York City, in either population or GDP. The metropolitan area of New York City has over 19 million residents, while Los Angeles's has roughly 13 million residents, as of 2022.
Sub-national divisions can also have primate cities. For instance, New York City is the State of New York's primate city, because its population is 32 times bigger than the state's second-largest city of Buffalo. New York City has 44% of the population and 65% of the GDP of the State of New York. The city of Anchorage is another U.S. example, with around 40% of the total population of Alaska living within the city's limits. China does not have a primate city at a national level, but several provincial capitals are disproportionately larger than other urban areas in the respective provinces. For example, Henan, Hubei, and Sichuan have provincial capitals (Zhengzhou, Wuhan, and Chengdu, respectively) that are significantly larger than the second-largest cities in those provinces, and each of those provinces has a population similar to that of a large European country. Spain does not have a primate city at the national level because, although Madrid is the capital and the principal centre of Castilian culture, it is not overwhelmingly larger than Barcelona in either population or economic importance. Barcelona is also a major cultural centre in its own right as the capital of Catalonia and the historic centre of Catalan culture. However, the autonomous community of Catalonia has a clear primate city in Barcelona. Barcelona is several times larger than Catalonia's other major cities (excluding those within its own metropolitan area), such as Tarragona, Reus, Lleida and Girona, and functions as the region's dominant political, economic and cultural centre. It contains roughly one-fifth of Catalonia's population, while the Barcelona metropolitan area is home to over 40% of the autonomous community's residents. India does not have a primate city, as Delhi is not much larger than Mumbai or Kolkata in terms of population. However, many Indian states, such as Karnataka, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Telangana, do have primate cities: Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, respectively. Other Indian states, such as Uttar Pradesh and Kerala, do not have any primate cities.
Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, has been called "the most primate city on Earth": in 2000 it was 40 times larger than the second-largest city of that time, Nakhon Ratchasima. Bangkok is nearly nine times larger than Thailand's current second-largest city of Chiang Mai, which has been growing in population and has also had its boundaries expanded to reflect that growth. Taking the concept from his examination of the primate city during the 2010 Thai political protests and applying it to the role that primate cities play if they are national capitals, researcher Jack Fong noted that when primate cities like Bangkok function as national capitals, they are inherently vulnerable to insurrection by the military and the dispossessed. He cites the fact that most primate cities serving as national capitals contain major headquarters for the country. Thus, logistically, it is rather "efficient" to target a national capital that is also a primate city; most of the governing power is contained in that one small area, and so are most of the people.
The metropolitan area of the city of Moscow, the capital of Russia, is 2.3 times the size of the metropolitan area of the next largest city, Saint Petersburg, and plays a dominant role as the cultural and political center of the country. It can therefore be considered a primate city.
Primate cities need not be capital cities: governments may establish a new capital city in an attempt to challenge the primacy of the largest city or provide more balanced growth. For example, in Tanzania, Dar es Salaam is still the primate city even though the capital was moved to Dodoma, a new city built to a plan, in 1996. A similar process (though without building a planned city) occurred when the existing city of Wellington was chosen as New Zealand's capital in 1865; Auckland, the capital before the relocation, commanded (and still commands) a greater share of the population and economy.
List
Africa
Country Primate Population Second largest Population Population differenceAddis Ababa 3,352,000Adama 342,940Algiers 7,896,923Oran 1,560,3295.1Antananarivo 1,275,207Toamasina 300,8134.2Asmara 650,000Keren 82,1987.9Bamako 1,810,366Sikasso 226,6188.0Bangui 622,771Bimbo 124,1765.0Banjul-Serekunda area 519,835Brikama 101,1195.1Bissau 492,004Gabu 48,67010.1Cairo 22,183,000Alexandria 6,100,0003.6Conakry 1,660,973Nzérékoré 195,0278.5Dakar 2,646,503Touba 753,3153.5Dar es Salaam 7,000,000Mwanza 1,104,5216.4Djibouti City 475,322Ali Sabieh 37,93912.5Praia 189,897Mindelo 70,4682.7Freetown 1,500,234Bo 233,6846.4Somaliland is a state with limited recognition, and is only recognized as a country by Taiwan and Israel.Hargeisa 1,200,000Burao 425,0002.8Kampala 1,507,080Nansana 365,1244.1Kigali 1,132,686Butare 89,60012.6Kinshasa 17,239,463Mbuji-Mayi 2,643,0007.3Lagos 16,637,000Kano 4,490,7343.7Libreville 703,904Port Gentil 136,4625.2Lomé 1,477,660Sokodé 118,00012.5Luanda 8,069,612Lubango 903,5648.9Lusaka 2,238,569Kitwe 522,0924.3Maseru 330,760Teyateyaneng 75,1154.4Monrovia 1,101,970Ganta 41,10626.8Nairobi 5,500,000Mombasa 1,208,3334.6N'Djamena 1,605,696Moundou 137,92911.6Niamey 1,243,500Zinder 235,6055.3Nouakchott 1,446,761Nouadhibou 173,525Omdurman-Khartoum area 5,490,000Port Sudan 489,72511.2Ouagadougou 2,500,000Bobo Dioulaso 537,7284.6São Tomé 71,868Santo Amaro 8,2398.7Tunis 2,643,695Sfax 1,018,3412.6Victoria 26,450Anse Boileau 4,0936.5Windhoek 325,858Walvis Bay 62,0965.2
Asia
Country Primate Population Second largest Population Population difference Amman 4,425,000 Irbid 750,0005.9 Ashgabat 1,168,000 Türkmenabat 253,0004.6 Baghdad 8,126,755 Mosul 1,792,0004.5 Baku 2,934,000 Ganja 335,0008.8 Bandar Seri Begawan 280,000 Kuala Belait 70,0004.0 Bangkok 16,255,900based on Bangkok Metropolitan Region Chiang Mai 1,213,000 13.4 Beirut 2,781,000 Tripoli 365,0007.6 Bishkek 1,297,000 Osh 282,0004.6 Colombo 5,648,000 Kandy 125,40045.0 Dhaka 22,478,116 Chittagong 5,252,8424.3 Dili 235,000 Baucau 15,00015.7 Dushanbe 1,390,000 Khujand 182,0007.6 Gaza City 766,331 Hebron 308,7502.5 Istanbul 15,569,856 Ankara 5,187,9493.0 Jakarta 32,594,159 Surabaya 9,958,6563.2 Kabul 4,834,000 Kandahar 570,0008.5 Kathmandu 3,941,000 Pokhara 523,0009.8 Kuala Lumpur 9,085,737 George Town 2,815,2783.2 Kuwait City 4,022,000 Al Jahra 400,00010.1 Malé 135,000 Addu City 34,0004.0 Muscat 1,205,000 Salalah 340,0003.5 Phnom Penh 2,177,000 Siem Reap 140,00015.6 Pyongyang 2,228,000 Hamhung 535,0004.2 Sana'a3,300,000 Aden1,154,0002.9 Seoul 26,085,040 Busan 6,804,9563.8 Tashkent 3,492,000 Samarkand 1,201,0002.9 Tbilisi 1,207,000 Batumi 200,0006.0 Tehran 13,633,000 Mashhad 3,167,0004.3 Tel AvivKipnis, B. (2004). Tel Aviv, Israel - a world city in evolution: Urban development at a deadend of the global economy. Dela, 21, 183–193. , "Tel Aviv [...] has been Israel's primate urban agglomeration since the 1920s (Reichmann 1972). Since the late 1980s it has evolved into the hard core of Israel's post-industrial globally oriented economy, its post-modern physical ambience and its social and cultural lifestyle." 4,054,570based on Tel Aviv metropolitan area Jerusalem 1,075,800based on Greater Jerusalem. This figure includes both West and East Jerusalem, and other localities of the Israeli Jerusalem District, but does not include adjacent localities in the West Bank, be they Israeli settlements such as Ma'ale Adumim or Palestinian localities such as Ramallah and Bethlehem.3.77 Thimphu 115,000 Phuntsholing 28,0004.1 Tokyo 41,000,000 Keihanshin (Osaka) 19,060,0002.1 Vientiane 1,058,000 Savannakhet 120,0008.8 Ulaanbaatar 1,752,000 Erdenet 112,52015.6 Yangon 7,360,703 Mandalay 1,726,8894.3 Yerevan 1,403,000 Gyumri 130,00010.8
For the Philippines, figures are for Metro Manila and Metro Cebu. Manila is the national capital, which is within Metro Manila, a region. Meanwhile, Cebu City is the capital city of the province of Cebu, with Metro Cebu being its main urban center. Metro Manila is within Mega Manila, the megapolis that has a population of around 25 million.
For Malaysia, data for Kuala Lumpur includes the surrounding state of Selangor and the Federal Territory of Putrajaya; while data for George Town includes the entire State of Penang and adjoining regions of Kulim and Kuala Muda (Sungai Petani) in the neighboring State of Kedah.