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Urban Primacy Index

The urban primacy index measures how dominant a country's largest city is relative to the cities below it in the size hierarchy. It grows out of Mark Jefferson's 1939 law of the primate city, which observed that many countries are headed by a single city far larger and more important than any other. The simplest two-city index divides the largest city's population by the second-largest's, while the four-city index compares the leading city with the combined size of the next three, giving a compact gauge of urban concentration.

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Sources

  1. Jefferson, M. (1939). The Law of the Primate City. Geographical Review, 29(2), 226–232. DOI: 10.2307/209944

How to cite this page

ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Urban Primacy Index (Law of the Primate City). ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/human-geography/urban-primacy-index

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ScholarGateUrban Primacy Index (Urban Primacy Index (Law of the Primate City)). Retrieved 2026-06-24 from https://scholargate.app/en/human-geography/urban-primacy-index · Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20539026