The validity of this “law” has been greatly weakened over the intervening decades,
but the general concept of a single urban place holding much greater significance
demographically and economically than other cities in a state is still accepted
and may be empirically demonstrated in numerous countries. If one extends the
concept to include the phenomenon of the emergingmegalopolis, found in many
world regions as a single urban space, then these new primate “megacities” re-
present an urban dominance never before witnessed.
Many primate cities may be identified. Paris is more than eight times larger than
the next largest city in France, and Mexico City is almost five times larger than
Guadalajara, the country’s second most populous city. In the United States, a
country with many large urban areas, New York is more than twice as large as
Los Angeles. Such cities typically contain not only a large share of the country’s
population, but also account for a disproportionate percentage of the country’s
economic production. For example, the metropolitan area of New York produces
over a trillion dollars of goods and services in an average year, a figure larger than
many entire states in the United States. Furthermore, the city plays a magnified
role in the country’s economy due to its hosting of the two largest stock exchanges268 Primate City
New York City is a classic example of a primate city. One in every 13 Americans lives in this
metropolitan area. Here the southern end of the borough of Manhattan, one of the most intensively
developed pieces of land in the world, is viewed beyond the Brooklyn Bridge. (Cpenler/
Dreamstime.com)