ancient cities

610 Progressive City
for a site; advantages maintained and enhanced
through investments; magnetic attractions for businesses,
services, and people (called a cumulative
effect); and disproportionate growth. These factors
increase the potential for a primate city to emerge.
To measure primacy throughout a country’s
system of cities, researchers use the rank­size rule,
which captures the relationship between the ranks
of cities and their populations. It was advanced by
George Zipf in 1949 and builds on Mark Jefferson’s
observation. Zipf asserted that “if all the settlements
of a country are ranked according to population
size, the sizes of the settlements will be
inversely proportional to their rank”; that is, the
second­largest city will be half the size of the first,
the third­largest one­third the size, and so forth.
The formula he used to represent this is [Pn =
P1/n], where Pn is the population of nth­ranked
city, P1 is the population of the largest city, and n
is the rank of nth city. Zipf further developed this
as a general formula [Pn = P1/n q ] where q is an
adjustment factor that is different for every country
because different countries have different
degrees of primacy. The stronger the primacy of
that country, the bigger the q value. When the largest
city of a country has more than twice the population
of the second­largest city, when q is greater
than 1, that country is considered to have a primate
urban system.
See also Megalopolis; Urban Agglomeration
Further Readings
Eun Jin Jung
Berry, B. J. L. 1961. “City Size Distribution and
Economic Development.” Economic Development and
Cultural Change 9(4):573–88.
Jefferson, M. 1939. “The Law of the Primate City.”
Geographical Review 29(2):226–32.
Zipf, G. K. 1949. Human Behavior and the Principle of
Least Effort. Cambridge, MA: Addison­Wesley.
Pr o g r e s s i v e ci t y
Gaining prominence in the United States during
the final decades of the twentieth century, the term
progressive city refers to an urban political and
developmental strategy that emphasizes public
planning, social equity, and neighborhood participation.
Such an approach is often counterposed to
downtown­oriented growth strategies that accentuate
market­led development and that restrict the
role of the public sector to tax incentives and the
provision of basic services. In progressive cities,
municipal governments pursue a more ambitious
agenda—from public ownership and fair taxation
to land use regulation and community development
partnerships—to promote rational economic
development, distribute the benefits of growth
more widely, and involve a broader range of constituents
in urban governance.
Principles and Characteristics
The urban progressives of the late twentieth century
did not explicitly derive their principles from
the reformers of the Progressive era. Yet, the
political impulses of the two projects were similar.
Just as the earlier movement had sought to build
cross­class reconciliation and public institutions to
harness the destabilizing energies of unbridled
capitalist development (and thereby also offer a
political alternative to corporate plutocracy and
labor radicalism alike), late­twentieth­century
visions of the progressive city searched for a middle
ground between the stark alternatives offered
by Marxist urbanism (capitalist versus socialist
city) and laissez­faire capitalism (entrepreneurial
versus welfare city). Articulating a set of governance
principles that balanced private­ and publicsector
interests, growth and equity, efficiency and
reform, these conceptions of the progressive city
also repositioned the urban planner in an important
yet intermediary role. Neither the elite technical
expert associated with postwar urban renewal
nor the activist planner borne aloft by the populist
energies of the 1960s movements, the progressive
planner was now seen as an inventive but pragmatic
professional who sought to balance economic
imperatives, social equity, and the public
interest.
This notion of the progressive city achieved its
fullest empirical development in the work of Pierre
Clavel. Like many observers of U.S. cities, Clavel
argued that the post–World War II political coalitions
that once had united developers, construction