Back সর্বপ্রধান নগরী Bengali/Bangla Ciutat primacial Catalan Primatstadt German Ciudad principal Spanish Primaatlinn Estonian עיר ראשה HE Kota prima ID プライメイトシティ Japanese Bandar raya primat Malay Primate city Dutch

Primate city

Colombo, the primate city of Sri Lanka; it is 45 times larger than Kandy, the country's second-largest city.
Countries without a national primate city highlighted in red

A primate city[1] is a city that is the largest in its country, province, state, or region, and disproportionately larger than any others in the urban hierarchy.[2] 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.[3]

The law of the primate city was first proposed by the geographer Mark Jefferson in 1939.[4] He defines a primate city as being "at least twice as large as the next largest city and more than twice as significant."[5] 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.[6]

  1. ^ Latin: 'prime', 'first rank'"Primate". Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 2008-07-21.
    From Old French or French primat, from a noun use of Latin primat-, from primus
  2. ^ Goodall, B. (1987). The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography. London: Penguin.
  3. ^ "GaWC Research Bulletin 186".
  4. ^ "The Law of the Primate City and the Rank-Size Rule, by Matt Rosenberg".
  5. ^ Jefferson, Mark (April 1939). "The Law of the Primate City". Geographical Review. 29 (29): 226–232. doi:10.2307/209944. JSTOR 209944.
  6. ^ Kotlyakov, Vladimir; Komarova, Anna (2007), Elsevier's Dictionary of Geography: in English, Russian, French, Spanish and German (1st ed.), North Holland, p. 776

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