Primate city

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 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. 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, political, cultural, and educational influence that the city possesses in comparison to other Turkish cities such as the capital Ankara, İzmir, or Bursa. Likewise, 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 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. 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: Bangalore, 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. As of 2022, 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 unique and uncontested role of 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 occurred when the existing city of Wellington was chosen as New Zealand's capital in 1865; Auckland, the capital before the relocation, commanded a greater share of the population and economy.

List

Africa

Country

Primate

Population

Second largest

Population

Relative primacy

Addis Ababa

3,352,000

Adama

342,940

Algiers

7,896,923

Oran

1,560,329

5.1

Antananarivo

1,275,207

Toamasina

300,813

4.2

Asmara

650,000

Keren

82,198

7.9

Bamako

1,810,366

Sikasso

226,618

8.0

Bangui

622,771

Bimbo

124,176

5.0

Banjul-Serekunda area

519,835

Brikama

101,119

5.1

Bissau

492,004

Gabu

48,670

10.1

Cairo

22,183,000

Alexandria

6,100,000

3.6

Conakry

1,660,973

Nzérékoré

195,027

8.5

Dakar

2,646,503

Touba

753,315

3.5

Dar es Salaam

7,000,000

Mwanza

1,104,521

6.4

Djibouti City

475,322

Ali Sabieh

37,939

12.5

Freetown

1,500,234

233,684

6.4

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Asia

Country	Primate	Population	Second largest	Population	Relative primacy
	Amman	4,425,000	Irbid	750,000	5.9
	Ashgabat	1,168,000	Türkmenabat	253,000	4.6
	Baghdad	8,126,755	Mosul	1,792,000	4.5
	Baku	2,934,000	Ganja	335,000	8.8
	Bandar Seri Begawan	280,000	Kuala Belait	70,000	4.0
	Bangkok	16,255,900	Chiang Mai	1,213,000	13.4
	Beirut	2,781,000	Tripoli	365,000	7.6
	Bishkek	1,297,000	Osh	282,000	4.6
	Colombo	5,648,000	Kandy	125,400	45.0
	Dhaka	22,478,116	Chittagong	5,252,842	4.3
	Dili	235,000	Baucau	15,000	15.7
	Dushanbe	1,390,000	Khujand	182,000	7.6
	Gaza City	766,331	Hebron	308,750	2.5
	Istanbul	15,569,856	Ankara	5,187,949	3.0
	Jakarta	32,594,159	Surabaya	9,958,656	3.2
	Kabul	4,834,000	Kandahar	570,000	8.5
	Kathmandu	3,941,000	Pokhara	523,000	9.8
	Kuala Lumpur	9,085,737	George Town	2,815,278	3.2
	Kuwait City	4,022,000	Al Jahra	400,000	10.1
	Malé	135,000	Addu City	34,000	4.0
	Metro Manila	13,484,000	Metro Cebu	3,166,000	4.3
	Muscat	1,205,000	Salalah	340,000	3.5
	Phnom Penh	2,177,000	Siem Reap	140,000	15.6
	Pyongyang	2,228,000	Hamhung	535,000	4.2
	Seoul	26,085,040	Busan	6,804,956	3.8
	Tashkent	3,492,000	Samarkand	1,201,000	2.9
	Tbilisi	1,207,000	Batumi	200,000	6.0
	Tehran	13,633,000	Mashhad	3,167,000	4.3
	Tel Aviv	4,054,570	Jerusalem	1,075,800	3.77
	Thimphu	115,000	Phuntsholing	28,000	4.1
	Tokyo	41,000,000	Keihanshin	19,060,000	2.1
	Vientiane	1,058,000	Savannakhet	120,000	8.8
	Ulaanbaatar	1,508,000	Erdenet	100,000	15.1
	Yangon	7,360,703	Mandalay	1,726,889	4.3
	Yerevan	1,403,000	Gyumri	130,000	10.8
	Sana'a	3,300,000	Aden	1,154,000	2.9
	Karachi	18,868,021	Lahore	13,004,135	1.5

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 in the neighboring State of Kedah.
In Vietnam, Hanoi is the primate city of Northern Vietnam, having 3.97 times the population of the area's second largest, Haiphong. Ho Chi Minh City is the primate city of Southern Vietnam, having 7.28 times the population of the area's second largest, Cần Thơ. However, there's no primate city in Central Vietnam as the most populous city has nearly the same population of the area's next largest. See also: List of cities in Vietnam