Q7.b. Critically evaluate the role of primate cities in dominating the urban spheres of influence in developing countries. 15 2025

Primate Cities and Urban Dominance in Developing Countries

Primate cities represent a distinctive phenomenon in developing nations, wherein a single metropolitan center exerts overwhelming dominance across economic, political, cultural, and demographic dimensions of a country’s urban system. This concentration fundamentally reshapes national spatial hierarchies and creates profound development inequalities.

Theoretical Framework: Definition and Measurement

Mark Jefferson first articulated the concept in 1939, defining a primate city as “at least twice as large as the next largest city and more than twice significant.” Operationally, a primate city is characterized as one whose population exceeds 20% of a country’s total urban residents or demonstrates a primacy index (ratio of largest to second-largest city population) exceeding 2.0. However, the Zipf’s Rank-Size Rule (1949) provides a critical counterpoint, proposing that in mature urban systems, the population of the nth-ranked city equals the largest city’s population divided by its rank: Pn = P₁/n. When actual distributions deviate dramatically from this logarithmic relationship—exhibiting sharp drops from the primate city to secondary centers—primacy becomes evident. The larger the deviation, the stronger the primacy effect. In contrast to Zipf’s theoretical model predicting balanced hierarchy, most developing nations exhibit what geographers term “immature distributions,” where one oversized metropolis dominates accompanied by a stratum of disproportionately small towns.

Causative Mechanisms: Colonial Mercantilism and Political Centralization

The genesis of primate cities in developing nations traces predominantly to colonial legacies and concentrated political governance. During colonialism, imperial powers established single dominant port cities—Singapore, Jakarta, Manila, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Cairo—as administrative and mercantile hubs for resource extraction and trade with metropolitan centers. Singapore exemplifies this trajectory: developed as a free port after 1819, it became the regional entrepôt through which goods from Sumatra, Java, Malaysia, and neighboring territories flowed toward Europe, creating a cosmopolitan mercantile landscape characterized by godowns (warehouses), shophouses, and trading networks. These colonial port cities possessed inherent advantages: concentrated maritime infrastructure, administrative apparatus, monopoly on international commerce, and capital accumulation mechanisms that reinforced their dominance through cumulative causation.

Post-independence political centralization perpetuated this pattern. Highly centralized governance systems concentrate administrative functions, cabinet ministries, supreme courts, and legislative assemblies in capital cities, attracting white-collar employment in bureaucracy, finance, media, and higher education—sectors overwhelmingly concentrated in primate cities. India’s national urban system defies strict primacy (Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Chennai share dominance at 20+ million each), but regional analysis reveals pronounced primacy: Delhi maintains continuous primacy in the northern region with consistently high primacy indices, while Mumbai dominates the west, Kolkata controls the east, and emerging competition characterizes the south with Bangalore and Hyderabad emerging post-liberalization as IT hubs.

Consequences: Parasitic Versus Generative Functions

The Parasitic-Generative Theory articulated by Hoselitz (1955) remains foundational to critical assessment. Parasitic primate cities extract surplus from hinterlands—drawing raw materials, migrant labor, agricultural products, and capital—without reciprocal development benefits. Bangkok exemplifies extreme parasitic primacy: with over 10 times the population of Thailand’s second-largest city Chiang Mai, it concentrates approximately 40% of national GDP through control of financial services, manufacturing, commerce, and tourism infrastructure. Bangkok’s dominance creates stark regional disparities, with rural and secondary urban areas remaining severely underdeveloped. Conversely, generative primate cities distribute innovations, technology, capital, and services to surrounding regions through backward linkages and market interactions.

Contemporary Challenges and Spatial Inequalities

Recent research (2025) demonstrates that urbanization intensifies urban primacy alongside rising infrastructure inequalities. In rapidly urbanizing Southeast Asian nations with pronounced primacy—Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia—infrastructure inequality increases at accelerating rates, with water and broadband inequalities between rich and poor urban areas simultaneously widening. Lagos, Nigeria (15+ million inhabitants) demonstrates extreme African primacy, consuming three times the population of Nigeria’s second-largest city and dominating national economic functions despite comprising merely 3% of national territory. Informal settlements envelop these primate cities: Cairo’s slums accommodate over 50% of residents; Manila and Manila’s peripheral areas contain sprawling informal communities; Bangkok faces massive congestion and housing affordability crises. These agglomerations generate overurbanization—urban population growth exceeding corresponding economic development capacity—resulting in unemployment, underemployment, inadequate service provision, and social instability.

Conclusion

Primate cities in developing countries represent locked-in spatial structures originating from colonial mercantilism and political centralization. While potentially generative engines of national development, they predominantly exhibit parasitic extraction from hinterlands, exacerbating regional inequalities. Addressing primacy requires deliberate decentralization policies, secondary city development investments, and spatially balanced infrastructure deployment to foster more equitable urban hierarchies aligned with rank-size principles rather than concentrated dominance.