Hierarchy of Urban Settlements

• The hierarchy of urban settlements is the ranked order of towns and cities by population, functions, level of services and sphere of influence.
• Each higher level serves a wider hinterland with a greater variety of more specialised services. It is also fewer in number and its members lie farther apart.
• The hierarchy is the vertical structure of an urban system: settlements linked by flows of goods, people, money and information, from market towns to world cities.

The Concept

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Urban System and Hierarchy

• The idea of an urban system was set out by Brian J. L. Berry (1964) in “Cities as systems within systems of cities”.
  • Urban places do not exist in isolation. Each town is linked to others, and to its own hinterland, through many kinds of relationships.
  • An urban system is any network of interdependent urban places. Each city is itself a system, and part of a larger system of cities.
• The urban hierarchy arranges these places vertically, from top to bottom. Ranking may use:
  • population size;
  • functions: the number, variety and order of goods and services offered;
  • sphere of influence: the extent of the hinterland served;
  • economic power, retail sales or the number of industrial workers.
• The hierarchy rests on a few regularities:
  • As settlements grow, the number and complexity of their functions increase.
  • Larger settlements are fewer and serve larger areas; smaller settlements are more numerous and serve local needs.
  • The distance between settlements of the same size increases with size.
  • Each level depends on, and interacts with, the levels above and below it.
• Theoretical roots:
  • Walter Christaller (1933) explained the hierarchy through threshold, range and nested market areas in central place theory; August Lösch (1940) generalised it.
  • Mark Jefferson (1939) described the dominance of a primate city, and George Kingsley Zipf (1949) gave the size continuum a statistical form in the rank-size rule.
  • Central place theory predicts a stepped hierarchy of distinct classes; the rank-size rule predicts a smooth continuum of sizes. Real systems show both: clear steps among small service centres, a near-continuum among large cities.

Levels of the Hierarchy

• Moving up the hierarchy, settlement size increases, the number of settlements decreases, the distance between same-order settlements increases, the range and variety of services grow and the sphere of influence widens.
  • Common size bands: hamlet below 100 people; village 100–5,000; town 5,000–1 lakh; city 1–10 lakh; metropolitan city 10–50 lakh (Lucknow, Pune, Ahmedabad); mega city 50 lakh–1 crore; megalopolis or conurbation above 1 crore. The UN counts megacities only from 1 crore.
  • About 68.84% of Indians lived in some 6.4 lakh villages in 2011.
  • Lewis Mumford called the city the physical form of the highest and most complex kind of associated life.
  • Low-order services (a post office, a general practitioner, a grocer) are found everywhere. High-order services (department stores, specialist hospitals, stock exchanges) appear only near the top.
  • London has a global sphere of influence; a hamlet’s may stretch a couple of kilometres.
• A conurbation (Patrick Geddes, 1915) forms when growing towns merge into one built-up area. A megalopolis (Jean Gottmann, 1961) is a chain of metropolitan areas, such as BosWash (Boston to Washington) or the Tokaido corridor (Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe).
  • Conurbation examples: the West Midlands and the NCR of Delhi. BosWash runs about 700 km.
  • India’s emerging examples are the Mumbai–Pune–Ahmedabad corridor through Surat, Vadodara and Anand, and the National Capital Region. Both are treated in conurbations and metropolitan regions.

Mumford’s Stages of the City

• Lewis Mumford (The Culture of Cities, 1938) read the hierarchy as a life cycle, building on Patrick Geddes. A city may climb, and then decay, through six stages:
  1. Eopolis: the rural village community, the seed of urban life.
  2. Polis: an association of villages with a market and a shrine; the first true town.
  3. Metropolis: the “mother city”, dominant in its region, drawing in surrounding towns and villages.
  4. Megalopolis: the beginning of decline: bigness, bureaucracy and the pursuit of money and power.
  5. Tyrannopolis: a parasitic city where services fail and life becomes miserable for most residents.
  6. Nekropolis: war, famine or disease empty the city; it becomes a shell or “ghost city”.
• Mumford’s megalopolis is a stage of decay, unlike Gottmann’s later use of the word for a chain of cities.

Measuring the Hierarchy

• Population size: the simplest measure. India’s Census size classes rank towns this way.
• Functions: count of central functions and of functional units (shops, banks, schools). Each function enters the hierarchy at its own threshold population, as Berry and Garrison showed in 1958.
• Centrality indices:
  • Christaller measured centrality by business telephones above the regional average.
  • Wayne K. D. Davies (1967) gave each function a location coefficient, C = (t ÷ T) × 100, where t is one outlet and T the total outlets of that function in the system. A town’s functional index is the sum of the coefficients of all its outlets.
  • Arthur E. Smailes (1944) ranked the towns of England and Wales by a “trait complex” of banks, chain stores, secondary schools, hospitals, cinemas and newspapers, into major cities, cities, minor cities, towns, sub-towns and urban villages.
• Sphere of influence: bus services, newspaper circulation, wholesale trade and commuting define how far each centre reaches; the sphere of urban influence grows with rank.
• Statistical regularities: the rank-size rule and the primacy index test the size distribution of the whole system.

Determinants of Position

• Population size: larger populations support more services and attract investment, reinforcing growth.
• Economic functions: the diversity and sophistication of activities, from processing to finance, IT and research, decide functional rank.
• Administrative role: national and State capitals and district headquarters gain from political power, public spending and offices.
• Transport connectivity: nodal positions on road, rail, air and water routes widen the hinterland.
• Infrastructure: health, education, utilities and housing draw skilled workers and firms.
• History: colonial ports (Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai) kept the lead that early investment gave them.

Urban Hierarchy in India

Census Size Classes

• The Census of India grades urban units, towns and urban agglomerations (UAs), into six size classes. Class I units are called cities.

• Typical members: Class I, Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata; Class II, Muzaffarnagar, Shimla, Berhampur; Class III, smaller district towns (Meerut before its growth); Class IV, most tehsil headquarters; Class V, larger census towns; Class VI, the smallest statutory towns.
• Further categories at the top:
  • Million-plus UAs or cities: 52 in 2011 (final tables; 53 in the provisional count), holding about 159.6 million people, 42.3% of the urban population. The 74th Constitutional Amendment (1992) defines a metropolitan area as one of 10 lakh or more.
  • Megacities (1 crore and above): Greater Mumbai UA (18.4 million), Delhi UA (16.3 million) and Kolkata UA (14.1 million).
• Urban units are either statutory towns (4,041 in 2011, with a municipal body) or census towns (3,892, meeting the population, density and non-farm work tests), as set out under the classification of settlements.
• The next census, with population enumeration referenced to 1 March 2027, will give the first post-2011 size classes.

Structure of the Indian Hierarchy

• Top-heavy: a few large cities hold most of the urban population, while the many small towns hold little.
  • The Class I share of urban population rose from 26.0% in 1901 to 44.6% in 1951, 65.2% in 1991 and 70.2% in 2011.
  • Towns below 20,000 (Classes IV–VI) held 47% of the urban population in 1901, but only about 10.6% in 1991 and 10.2% in 2011.
  • Million-plus cities rose from one (Kolkata) in 1901 to 5 in 1951, 23 in 1991, 35 in 2001 and 52 in 2011 (53 in the provisional count).
• Poly-metropolitan: India has no single national primate city. Its size, federal structure and the parallel colonial growth of Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai prevent it.
  • Regional primacy is strong: Kolkata in the east, Mumbai in the west and Delhi in the north. The south has rival cities (Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad) rather than one primate city.
  • Primacy exists in at least 15 of India’s 29 States on the older count, and Kolkata was almost 7 times the next eastern city until 2001.
  • The size distribution has drifted away from the rank-size rule towards dominance of large cities: the Zipf slope moved from about −1.10 in 1901 to about −0.85 in 2011.
• Breaks and imbalances: small and medium towns have stagnated while metros grew. The system is not well integrated, functionally or spatially.
  • The phrase for these gaps in the hierarchy and the rural–urban profile is Rama Baru’s.
  • IT-led growth of Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Gurugram is filling the upper-middle tier.
• Small-town surge: census towns jumped from 1,362 in 2001 to 3,892 in 2011. Much of this “subaltern urbanisation” happens in small places growing on their own, outside the metropolitan orbit.
• Colonial roots:
  • The British built Bombay, Calcutta and Madras as administrative, commercial and industrial hubs for trade and resource extraction, leaving a top-heavy hierarchy with weak intermediate cities.
  • Delhi’s growth as the primate city of the north accelerated after it became the capital in 1911, and again after 1947.
  • Many rural migrants move for survival rather than opportunity, so urban growth often means slums and informal work rather than productive growth, a pattern described as subsistence urbanisation.
• A global view: World Urbanization Prospects 2025 applies one density-based definition to all countries (a city has at least 50,000 people at 1,500 or more per km²).
  • On this basis Delhi (30 million) and Kolkata (23 million) are among the world’s ten largest cities, larger than their census UAs because contiguous dense villages and towns are included.
  • Towns are India’s most common settlement type, and Hajipur, near Patna, is projected to pass 10 million by 2050.
  • The gap between census and harmonised figures shows how much of India’s real urban hierarchy lies in places the Census still counts as rural.

Functional and Regional Patterns

• Size and function do not always match. A town’s functional rank depends on the order of the services it offers, so a district headquarters of 60,000 may outrank a larger industrial or mining town.
  • Plotted against population, most places lie close to one line. A seaside resort has more functions than its size suggests; a dormitory town has fewer.
  • Railway towns (Mughalsarai, now Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Nagar), steel towns (Bhilai, Bokaro) and mining towns (Dhanbad) can be large but serve their hinterlands less than their size suggests.
  • Pilgrim and educational towns (Varanasi, Haridwar, Tirupati, Aligarh) have spheres far wider than their size.
  • Grouping towns by dominant function is the subject of the functional classification of towns.
• Within a State the hierarchy usually runs: State capital → divisional headquarters → district towns → tehsil towns → market towns and large villages.
  • In Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow is the capital, Kanpur the largest agglomeration, and Prayagraj, Varanasi and Agra are divisional centres above some 75 district towns.
  • Where the capital is also the largest city (Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru), the State shows regional primacy.
• Early Indian studies built the field: Ram Lochan Singh’s Banaras: A Study in Urban Geography (1955) delimited the city’s umland and its service hierarchy, and later studies ranked towns by the number and order of their central functions.
• The rural–urban continuum links the two ends. Large villages with markets, schools and clinics grade into census towns, and the line between the lowest urban and highest rural ranks is blurred.

Administrative and Planning Hierarchy

• India’s administrative units form a nested hierarchy of seats of government, each serving the units inside it.

• Divisions sit between the State and the district. Below the district (zila parishad) the ladder splits:
  • rural: block and tehsil, then village (gram panchayat);
  • urban: municipal corporation, municipality and nagar panchayat, each divided into wards.
• Other hierarchies used in planning:
  • X, Y and Z cities for house rent allowance: 50 lakh and above, 5–50 lakh, and below 5 lakh.
  • The National Commission on Urbanisation (1988) identified Generators of Economic Momentum (GEMs) and Spatial Priority Urban Regions (SPURs) to steer investment to chosen cities.
  • Schemes for small and medium towns (IDSMT from 1979, later folded into wider urban missions) aimed to strengthen the weak middle of the hierarchy.

World City Hierarchy

• Above national hierarchies sits a transnational tier of world cities. They interact more with each other than with their own hinterlands.
  • John Friedmann’s world city hypothesis (1986) ranked cities as primary and secondary world cities in core and semi-peripheral countries.
    • His criteria: a major financial centre, headquarters of transnational corporations, international institutions, fast-growing business services, important manufacturing, a major transport node and a large population.
  • Saskia Sassen (1991) identified New York, London and Tokyo as global cities: command points of the world economy.
• The Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) network classifies cities by their connectivity in advanced producer services (accountancy, advertising, finance, law, management consultancy).
  • GaWC 2024 assessed 785 cities through 175 firms and placed 335 in twelve levels, from Alpha++ to Sufficiency.
  • The levels describe roles, not size:
    • Alpha cities link major economic regions and states into the world economy;
    • Beta cities link their region or country into it;
    • Gamma cities link smaller regions, or are world cities whose strength lies outside producer services;
    • Sufficiency cities have enough services not to depend overtly on world cities.
  • Alpha++: London and New York. Alpha+: Hong Kong, Beijing, Singapore, Shanghai, Paris, Dubai, Tokyo and Sydney.
  • Indian cities: Mumbai (Alpha), New Delhi (Alpha−), Bengaluru (Beta+), Chennai (Beta−), Hyderabad (Gamma+), Pune and Ahmedabad (Gamma). Kolkata, India’s third-largest agglomeration, is only at Sufficiency level: population rank and global connectivity diverge.
• Megacities multiply as the world urbanises: 33 in 2025, up from 8 in 1975, with Jakarta (about 42 million), Dhaka and Tokyo the largest (World Urbanization Prospects 2025).

Significance and Contemporary Shifts

Significance

• Regional planning: gaps in the service hierarchy show where growth centres, new towns, industrial corridors and satellite towns are needed.
• Infrastructure: hospitals, universities and transport hubs are placed by the threshold of each urban level.
• Migration: knowing why migrants bypass small towns for metros helps design incentives for intermediate cities, easing pressure on metros.
• Sustainability: a balanced hierarchy of towns, secondary cities and metros is more resilient, equitable and environmentally sound than a primate-dominated one.
• Spheres of influence define planning regions, market areas and administrative jurisdictions.
• Hierarchical diffusion: innovations, fashions, technologies and diseases often spread down the hierarchy, from metros to cities to towns, before they reach the countryside between them. Mobile telephony in the 2000s and the COVID-19 wave of 2020 both moved through India’s metros first and smaller towns later.
• Intercepting migration: the National Capital Region plan names counter-magnet towns such as Hisar, Bareilly, Kota, Patiala and Gwalior to hold back migrants bound for Delhi, an attempt to strengthen a missing tier, like the satellite towns around the metro itself.
• Policy: AMRUT 2.0 (2021) covers all statutory towns, the Smart Cities Mission (2015) targeted 100 cities, and PM Gati Shakti (2021) plans multimodal links. Together they aim to strengthen secondary and tertiary cities.

Criticisms of Hierarchy Models

• Economic rank only: they measure size and output and ignore quality of life, liveability and equity.
• Static: central place theory and the rank-size rule do not show how hierarchies change with technology, policy or disasters.
• Poor fit in the developing world: colonial, political, cultural and topographic factors distort the ideal hierarchy in India, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
• Non-market towns: religious (Varanasi, Mecca), educational (Oxford, Aligarh) and defence towns do not fit market-based ranks.
• Globalisation adds a world-city tier that cuts across national hierarchies.

Contemporary Shifts

• Secondary cities rise: IT and services growth in Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad and Gurugram is broadening India’s upper tier.
• Post-COVID dispersal: remote work has moved some people from megacities to smaller towns, which may flatten hierarchies, mainly in developed countries.
• Digital connectivity: e-commerce, telemedicine and online learning bring higher-order services to small towns and narrow the gap between levels.
• New capitals disrupt existing hierarchies on purpose: Indonesia’s planned Nusantara and Egypt’s New Administrative Capital.
• Networks over ladders: small towns gain global links, while regional centres face problems once limited to megacities. A rigid ladder explains less than it did.
• Balanced urban systems are the goal of SDG 11 (sustainable cities) and of India’s draft National Urban Policy Framework (2018): every settlement, from village to metropolis, playing its role in one integrated system.