Secondary city

A "secondary city" often follows after a primate city and can be seen in the urban hierarchy. Secondary cities have between “500,000 to 3 million inhabitants, but are often unknown outside of their national or regional context. Secondary cities in the Global South will undergo massive expansions in the next few decades, comparable to city growth in Europe and North America one to two hundred years ago. As cities and their populations grow, everything else grows with them: wealth and creativity, as well as traffic, criminality, disease and pollution.”

"A secondary city is largely determined by population, size, function, and economic status. Commonly, secondary cities are geographically defined urban jurisdictions or centres performing vital governance, logistical, and production functions at a sub-national or sub-metropolitan region level within a system of cities in a country. In some cases, their role and functions may expand to a geographic region of the global realm. The population of secondary-cities range between 10 and 50% of a country's largest city, although some can be smaller than this. They will likely constitute a sub-national or sub-metropolitan second-tier level of government, acting as centres for public administration and delivery of education, knowledge, health, community, and security services; an industrial centre or development growth pole; a new national capital; or a large city making up a cluster of smaller cities in a large metropolitan region."

Furthermore, secondary cities “usually form more recent poles of growth, often also with a more diffuse genealogy, than larger metropoles. The ambivalent situation of these towns (in the periphery of the center and in the center of the periphery, in so far as these notions still retain their meaning) generates a particular, and by definition highly hybrid, socio-cultural urban dynamic which in turn influences the outlook of social, political and economic life in the more visible national metropoles.”

Secondary cities have their own socio-economic and political culture that may differ from other cities such as Primate cites. Moreover, in the secondary city (and more generally in the margin of the state) there often is more room for improvisation. Local commerce, trading routes and smuggling networks determine the economic sphere in important ways; local forms of associational life (the middle ground of ‘civil society’) has a far greater influence on local politics than is the case in larger urban centers, and the functioning of local, decentralized political authorities is often shaped and cross-cut to a far greater extent by constantly shifting alliances between local stakeholders.”

According to UN-HABITAT, "slum population now expands annually by 25 million. In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population over one million, today there are 400, and by 2015, there will be at least 550."

...
Wikipedia