What is the rank size rule?
Asked by: Brigitte Abbott | Last update: April 26, 2025Score: 4.7/5 (11 votes)
The rank-size rule is a rule about an inverse size to rank, often described as the size of cities in a country. The rank-size rule says that the second-largest city will have half the population as the largest.
What is the rank-size rule theory?
The concept of rank-size settlement system was suggested by G K ZIPF in 1949. He proposed that if all urban settlements in an area are arranged in descending order of their population, the population of the nth ranking town will be I/n of the largest city. P= population of the largest city (Primate city).
How does rank-size rule apply to the US?
According to this rule, the population of a city is inversely related to its rank; specifically, the second-largest city will have about half the population of the largest city, the third-largest city will have one-third, and so on.
What does the rank-size rule indicate for a country?
The Rank-Size Rule Distribution is a principle in urban geography that describes how the sizes of cities within a country or region are distributed in relation to each other.
How do you calculate rank-size?
Rank–size rule
If one ranks the population size of cities in a given country or in the entire world and calculates the natural logarithm of the rank and of the city population, the resulting graph will show a linear pattern. This is the rank-size distribution.
Urban Hierarchy: Rank-size rule and Primate Cities - Google Slides
What does the rank-size rule predict?
Rank Size Rule : Example Question #2
According to the rank-size rule, there should be a larger number of small cities than bigger cities. Also, this rule predicts that the larger a city's population is then the fewer number of cities there should be in the surrounding area with a similar population.
How is rank calculated?
You can calculate the percentile rank using this formula:Percentile rank = p / 100 × (n + 1)In the equation: p represents the percentile. n represents the total number of items in the data set.
What are the cons of rank-size rule?
Problems with the Rank Size Rule
The Rule does not take into account factors that can influence the size and importance of cities, such as geography, infrastructure, and economic development.
What is rank rule?
The Rank-Size Rule. • If all cities in a country are placed in order. from the largest to the smallest, each one will have a population half the size of the preceding city. – Zipf's law applied to distribution of cities (1935)
What country follows the rank-size rule?
The United States has a large population, a large area, and a long history of urbanization. Thus, it has none of the three characteristics used to generate primate cities. In fact, the United States follows the Rank-Size Rule.
How do the US states rank in size?
California ranks as the third largest state by area (163,696 square miles or 423,970 square kilometers) and largest by population.
What rank-size is the US?
The United States is the world's third largest country by area, ranked behind Russia and Canada. Within that large are 50 states that vary widely in area. The largest state, Alaska, is more than 400 times larger than Rhode Island, the smallest state. Including water features, Alaska is 663,267 square miles.
Where does the rank-size rule not apply?
Explanation: Primate cities often don't comply with the rank-size rule because they tend to be significantly larger and more influential than other cities in their region or country. The rank-size rule suggests a city's population will be inversely proportional to its rank in the hierarchy of cities.
Does Japan follow the rank-size rule?
Indeed, of the 47 Japanese prefectures, only four (specifically, the Metropolis of Tokyo; Hiroshima, Shimane, and Fukuoka Prefectures) are shown to exhibit the typical rank-size rules, where the first in the parentheses possesses the exceptionally high population density as well as urbanized rate.
What are the criticism of primate city?
Criticisms of the Primate City
While primate cities have a lot of influence within their respective countries, this can lead to political and economic marginalization. As the focus of development is placed primarily on the primate city, other areas of a country may be neglected.
What is the number one country in the world?
United States. The United States of America is a North American nation that is the world's most dominant economic and military power. Likewise, its cultural imprint spans the world, led in large part by its popular culture expressed in music, movies and television.
What is the smallest country in the world compared to the United States?
Smallest countries worldwide 2020, by land area
The smallest country in the world is Vatican City, with a landmass of just 0.49 square kilometers (0.19 square miles). Vatican City is an independent state surrounded by Rome. Vatican City is not the only small country located inside Italy.
How does the US economy rank in size?
Global gross domestic product
The U.S. has consistently had the world's largest economy since the interwar period, and while previous reports estimated it would be overtaken by China in the 2020s, more recent projections estimate the U.S. economy will remain the largest by a considerable margin going into the 2030s.
What is the best example of rank-size rule?
Los Angeles, the second largest city is roughly half the population of New York City, the largest city in the US. Chicago is the third largest city with around one-third the population of New York City. Houston, the fourth largest city, has approximately one-fourth the population of New York.
Does France follow the rank-size rule?
Rosen and Resnick (1980) extensively analyse international evidence on the rank size rule as it applies to cities as defined by their political boundaries. They find that for most of the 44 countries in their sample (including Japan and France) cities are distributed more evenly than the rank size rule would predict.
Who created the rank-size rule?
In 1949, George Zipf devised his theory of rank-size rule to explain the size cities in a country. He explained that the second and subsequently smaller cities should represent a proportion of the largest city.
What is rank formula?
=RANK(number,ref,[order])
The RANK function uses the following arguments: Number (required argument) – This is the value for which we need to find the rank. Ref (required argument) – Can be a list of, or an array of, or reference to, numbers.
What does the rank tell us?
The rank tells us a lot about the matrix. It is useful in letting us know if we have a chance of solving a system of linear equations: when the rank equals the number of variables we may be able to find a unique solution.
How does a rank work?
A ranking is a relationship between a set of items, often recorded in a list, such that, for any two items, the first is either "ranked higher than", "ranked lower than", or "ranked equal to" the second. In mathematics, this is known as a weak order or total preorder of objects.