Urban Primacy Within Latin American, Research Paper Example

The human society in towns, cities as well as villages plays a crucial role in determining population distributions in a particular region. The long-term trend toward urban primacy within Latin American countries can easily be elaborated by the use of some theories that tend to explain urban primacy. The theories are generally classified as political or economical. According to the arguments of social geographers, an economy with some features of integrated space is likely to yield activities that are distributed on the basis of locations so that the products, whose means of production can be centralized to gain advantage of cheap transportation and storage costs, can be located at one point of the centralized city. On the other hand, the products whose transportation and storage costs are higher are much likely to be dispersed across the territory. In this regard, the theory fails to account for geographical factors that influence spatial plane including mountain ranges, water bodies and rivers that can affect the cost of transportation and the resources that are impacted by nature including suitability of land for agriculture and mineral deposits.

Another theory that posits to elaborate variations of steepness in the hierarchies of the size of city focus on spatial distribution in political-military influence. The empires whose political organs are organized in a central manner have potentials for creation of city systems that are more hierarchical in contrast to the networks marked by independence in nation states as well as city states. The concentration of political-military influence is associated with higher echelons of wealth concentration which thence leads to concentration of population in one region. Power distribution is not conventionally organized on the basis of territory thus creating substantial looseness of fit with regard to concentration of in connection to spatial hierarchies.

The long-term trend toward urban primacy within Latin American countries is based on the above mentioned theoretical approaches that tend to specifically detail the development of societies in Latin America. The dependency theory is however marked with some variations that explain the contribution of world economy periphery regions in the development of primate systems of the city. Cities of larger sizes are anticipated to function as funnels that are responsible for channeling the raw materials to the core nations. There could be failure of emergency of middle size cities that engage in the production of manufactured goods due to lack of capacities for competition with the manufactured goods produced more cheaply in the core countries.

The generally acceptable claim behind the development of urban primacy in Latin America is the political power which was exercised by colonial municipalities of the Spanish over hitherlands. The rise of Latin America is also attributed to the proliferation export agriculture on large scale basis.  The long-term trend of urban primacy within Latin American countries is further enhanced by other factors. These include the free labor markets development in larger cities which is attributed to restriction in employment availability and it was also attributed to primacy development. The reason given behind this postulation is exodus of immigrants to larger cities from the rural regions. International immigration to the larger city plays a key role. This is further enhanced by scarcity in the rural land that is socially produced and therefore settlement in these rural areas becomes difficult. This consequently forces the immigrants to look for alternative settlements in large cities.