A primate city is the largest city in its country or region, disproportionately larger than any others in the urban hierarchy. A ‘primate city distribution’ is a rank-size distribution that has one very large city with many much smaller cities and towns, and no intermediate-sized urban centres – a King effect, visible as an outlier on an otherwise linear graph, when the rest of the data fit a power law or stretched exponential function. The ‘law of the primate city’ was first proposed by the geographer Mark Jefferson in 1939. He defines a primate city as being “at least twice as large as the next largest city and more than twice as significant. A primate city is number one in its country in most aspects, like politics, economy, media, culture and universities.

Source: NCERT