Urban Models and Structure

Some countries have one city that towers over every other urban center in the national hierarchy, a pattern the geographer Mark Jefferson named the "law of the primate city" in 1939. A primate city is typically at least twice as large as the second-ranked city and dominates the country's political, economic, and cultural life disproportionately. Bangkok, roughly forty times larger than Thailand's second city, is a textbook example, as is Paris within France, Buenos Aires within Argentina, and Lima within Peru. Urban primacy often reflects colonial-era administrative centralization, in which a single port or capital was built up as the sole gateway between a colony and the imperial metropole, a pattern that persisted after independence.