Urban Primacy before Mark Jefferson

Abstract

The phenomenon of urban primacy has been much studied in the social sciences since Mark Jefferson introduced the term in 1939. It is less well recognized that many European and American writers of stature from the late seventeenth century onward had discussed the same phenomenon under other names, often that of a “capital” or its cognates in other languages. Their work attests to the wide currency that the concept enjoyed and offered many important suggestions regarding urban primacy's causes and consequences. Jefferson nonetheless remains a central figure in the history of the idea for having inaugurated the coordinated academic study of the topic.

• capital cities
• Mark Jefferson
• primate cities
• urban geography
• urban primacy

Notes

1. Thus Jefferson did not define a primate city as one with twice or more the population of the next largest city. Rather, he introduced that numerical index–one taken up by many later writers–as a plausible, though imperfect, indicator of the presence of primacy as he defined the phenomenon. “For most urban specialists the disparity in population sizes [between the primate and lesser cities] is but an indicator of more significant relationships” (Argenbright 2013, 20).

2. Cybriwsky (1998, 234n) found fault with Jefferson's choice of a name: “Use of the term primate city ignores the fact that in correct English the adjective ‘primate’ refers to a zoological category. It is never a synonym for ‘first‐ranking’ or ‘primary.’” But as the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear, the word's original meanings referred to social rank, the natural‐science sense being derived from them by analogy, not the other way around.

3. Clark (1988, 42) noted “Jacobs's apparent lack of familiarity with the primate city literature (why else did she coin the concept of the elephant city?).”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William B. Meyer

DR. MEYER is an associate professor of geography at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York 13346 [[email protected]].