Secondary Cities: Definitions and Concepts 35
Table 2.2
Typology of Urban Functions of Secondary Cities
Type of urban function
Description
Regional market
The city is a driving force for the production and exchange of goods and services at the level of the local and immediate regional economy.
Service centre
The city offers a number of public services: health care, secondary and tertiary educational institutions as well as private services, banks, businesses, leisure and information centres – for both the urban community and the surrounding population.
Regional capital
The city hosts various provincial and/or national political and administrative institutions for the territory in which it lies.
Tourist centre
The city makes use of its comparative advantages – location, natural resources, historic legacy, culture, etc., to promote activities linked directly to domestic and/or international tourism.
Communication hub
Owing to its strategic location and the development of relevant infrastructure, the city acts as a platform for the exchange of persons, goods and information.
Economic location
The city’s geographic location (border zone, coast, city-state) and its development strategy (duty-free zone, international tourism) endow it with a strategic role in the national, regional and global economy and related exchange mechanisms.
Source: Song (2013) adapted from Bolay and Rabinovich (2004)
Integrating these factors, it may be possible to develop a framework describing attributes of secondary cities that can be used to define strategic infrastructure, logistics and governance arrangements necessary to support the management and development of secondary cities in developing countries and regions. Scope and scale clearly matter in the new economic geography of cities. For simplicity, we can usefully classify cities by population as supra, mega, metro, meso, micro and mini. “Supra” involves an interlinked system or clusters of very large cities that form a conglomeration of populations in excess of 50 million. Supra is a new term, but already it is being applied in China and India (DMIC, 2010; China Daily, 2011). For convenience, “megacities” are defined as large metropolitan regions of 10 million plus; “metro”, populations 5-10 million; “meso” 1-5 million; “micro” 200,000-1 million; and “mini”, cities less than 200,000 population. There will always be debate on the population range used in this classification of city scale; however, we need to find a basis of scale that can be linked to the function of cities in a global context, and to define a realm in which there are commonalities of city forms and function that can be classified as “secondary” within the order of cities. Figure 2.3 shows, conceptually, how we could link scale, spatial global order and functionality of cities. In the figure, primary cities have dominance in global market orientation, scope and function. Global primate cities are important logistical and market centres and hubs,