Primate City

5 Key excerpts on "Primate City"

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  eBook - ePub

  Urban World/Global City

  • David Clark(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Differences in size are inevitably reflected in an imbalance of importance and role. Primate cities typically dominate their countries in economic and political terms. Invariably they are the centres in which national elites and other major decision makers and opinion leaders are concentrated. They are the headquarters for national television and telephone services and have the principal, indeed in many cases the only, international airport. In turn, they are the link points through which the dependent village population is connected to the global urban system.

  Studies of city size distributions provide an indirect insight into the characteristics of urban linkages and connectivity. Together with work on the distribution of the urban population, they paint a picture of gross unevenness and variable integration. Not only are the spread of urban population and the level of urban development far from uniform, but cities differ significantly in the extent and ways in which they interconnect and interdepend. Cities in countries with rank-size patterns tend to be well integrated within wider networks; those in countries with primate distributions, with the exception of the Primate City itself, are predominantly inward-looking and have strongest connections with the indigenous economy.

  These differences suggest that the global urban system is presently fragmented and incomplete. Rather than a coherent whole, the contemporary urban world consists of a set of loosely knit subsystems. The largest is global in extent and is based upon movements and exchanges of people, goods, images, information and ideas among rank-sized urban centres and primate cities. It is dominated by the cities in the core economies, but also includes the primate and principal centres in the periphery. Other subsystems, in the periphery, have primate cities as their apexes, but have few external links except through the Primate City and so function primarily at a local scale. Still others, in the most remote and backward parts of the periphery, are divorced even from national urban systems and so operate in comparative independence and isolation. Such observations provide support for those who question the idea of a global urban hierarchy and regard it as misleading and unhelpful.

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  Human Geography

  People, Place, and Culture

  • Erin H. Fouberg, Alexander B. Nash, Alexander B. Murphy, Harm J. de Blij(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Primate cities tend to be the largest and most economically influential within the state, with the next largest city in the state being much smaller and much less influential. There are primate cities in many former colonies, as the colonial powers often ruled from a single dominant city, where economic and political activities were concentrated. In the non- colonial context, London and Paris each serve as examples of primate cities and world cities today, but some countries, such as the United States and Germany, have two or more world cities within their state borders. They thus do not have a single, distinct Primate City. To understand the role of cities in global- ization, we must also consider the services cities provide to places and peoples around the world, as well as the intercon- nectedness among cities. Geographers are now working to un- cover the globalized flows and processes occurring across world cities, bringing them closer together. GUEST FIELD NOTE A Sporting Chance for Cities More than a century ago, French nobleman Pierre Coubertin restored the Olympic Games as a mechanism to internationalize the benefits of sport. Coubertin believed that through participa- tion or spectatorship, the Olympic spectacle had the capacity to reduce the social distance between various nations, regions, or societies of the world. As a researcher, and as someone with a lifelong passion for sports, I am interested in the role that sport plays in modern life. One of the most visible opportunities to witness the sym- bolic power of sport is during the Olympic bidding process. Cit- ies vie aggressively for what many see as the privilege of hosting the Olympic Games. Success means a city may gain recognition on the international stage and the construction of new sports and recreational facilities that enhance the quality of life for in- habitants while also contributing, many argue, to the overall economic, political, and social life of the city.

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  Human Geography

  People, Place, and Culture

  • Erin H. Fouberg, Alexander B. Murphy(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Source: Dash Nelson G, Rae A (2016) An Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to Megaregions. PLoS ONE 11(11): e0166083. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0166083. 274 CHAPTER 9 Urban Geography In 1961, geographer Brian Berry studied 37 populations of coun- tries and found that the rank-size rule worked in 13 countries and the Primate City pattern was more evident in 15 countries, while the remaining 9 countries followed neither pattern. Many former colonies have primate cities because coloniz- ers ruled from one city and concentrated economic and political activities in that place. Examples of primate cities in former colonies include Mexico City, Mexico, and Manila, the Philippines (Fig. 9.21). In the noncolonial context, London and Paris serve as examples of primate cities in the United Kingdom and France, respectively. Central Place Theory Walter Christaller wrote a classic urban geography study to explain where cities, towns, and villages are likely to be located. In his book The Central Places in Southern Germany (1933), Christaller laid the groundwork for central place theory. His goal was to pre- dict where central places in the urban hierarchy (hamlets, villages, towns, and cities) would be located. Christaller believed that the urban hierarchy was nested. The largest central place, a city, would provide the greatest number of functions to a large trade area, a hinterland. Within that trade area, a series of towns would provide functions to smaller villages. The smaller villages would then provide fewer central functions to hamlets. Christaller’s theory makes several assumptions. First, the surface of the ideal region would be flat and have no physical bar- riers. Second, soil fertility would be the same everywhere. Third, population and purchasing power would be evenly distributed. Fourth, the region would have a uniform transportation network to permit direct travel from each settlement to the other.

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  Southeast Asia (Routledge Revivals)

  A Region in Transition

  • Jonathan Rigg(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Sources: World Bank 1989, Lee-Jay Cho and Bauer 1987, p. 16, Ginsburg 1988, p. 41.

  Notes: 1) 1982 data. 2) Weighted relative to 1985/7 population and excluding Brunei.

  Urban primacy

  The concept of the Primate City was first developed by Jefferson in a short paper published in 1939. With reference to London, Paris and a number of other cities he noted that they were both considerably larger than the second cities of their respective countries and were also functionally dominant:

  The finest wares are to be found there, the rarest articles, the greatest talents, the most skilled workers in every science and art. Thither flows an unending stream of the young and ambitious in search of fame and fortune, and there fame and fortune are found. London is the kingdom’s market for all that is superlative in intellectual and material productions. Its supereminence as a market runs parallel to its supereminence in size. It is the Primate City of the United Kingdom … All over the world it is the Law of the Capitals that the largest city shall be supereminent, and not merely in size, but in national influence (Jefferson 1939, pp. 226–7).

  Table 7.2

  The primate cities of Southeast Asia

  Notes: 1) Source: Jones 1988, p. 139. 2) Source: World Bank 1987. 3) The ratio of the population of the largest city to that of the next three largest. Source: Jones 1988, p. 143. 4) The ratio of the population of the largest city to that of the second largest. Source: Thienchay Kiranandana & Suwanee Suransiengsunk 1985, pp. 61–2. 5) Yeu-man Yeung 1988, p. 160.

  Although methods of measurement vary (see Table 7.2 ), the concept of primacy is particularly applicable to Southeast Asia and there have been a succession of articles examining the ‘great’ cities of the region (e.g. Ginsburg 1976, 1988, Drakakis-Smith & Rimmer 1982, Yue-man Yeung 1988, London 1977, 1980). Table 7.2

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  Urban Governance and Local Democracy in South India

  • Anil Kumar Vaddiraju(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge India

    (Publisher)

  Urban primacy also means domination of a single city over the others. The mega-urban agglomerations tend to dominate economically, politically and culturally over all the other cities and surrounding rural areas of the region. The mega-urban agglomerations become centres of the economic, political and cultural elite around which form the paraphernalia of media, technocracy and political middlemen. The culture industries of particular languages or ethnic groups, too, are concentrated in these mega-urban agglomerations, making them sources of cultural hegemony. Their economies wield enormous power and dominance. The financial services of an entire economy, too, are often concentrated in the megacities, which become hubs and headquarters of finance from which financial services branch out to other cities and places of the region.

  Urban primacy, being coterminous with political centralization, runs counter to the tenets of decentralization and the subsidiarity principle. Both intra-city and inter-city decision-making powers get concentrated in the top political elite as these mega-urban agglomerations also serve as political capitals.

  Urban development of this kind leads to the concentration of health and educational services both public and private in one city. Elite university and higher education centres, hospitals and healthcare industries are concentrated in mega-urban agglomerations, causing difficulty for the citizens from other places in accessing the services. Gradually these education and health industries develop their own elite. Thus, the Primate City becomes the only repository of high-quality services such as super-specialty hospitals and elite institutions of higher learning.

  Browning (1989), while noting the consequences of urban primacy, states that:

  [i]t should be noted at the outset that the consequences of high urban primacy need to be viewed in the context in which they are found. In Latin America, for example, many of the countries are so small in area and population that it makes sense to have most of the high order urban functions in one city. Primate cities in these countries can easily serve the entire country and are in no danger of becoming excessively large. In larger countries, however, the concentration of so much of a country’s population, political power, wealth, brains and talent often comes at the expense of the regional centres. The siphoning off from the provinces of these able and ambitious people deprives these regions of people with leadership qualities.

  (p. 76)

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