Urban Agglomerations: Approaches to the Allocation and Delimitation

Currently, Russia has declared the need to develop a federal law “On urban agglomerations”; the development of urban agglomerations is declared as a necessary condition for ensuring economic growth and innovative development in the country. However, there are no evident approaches to the allocation and delimitation of urban agglomerations; the definitions given in the Russian spatial development strategy are very general. In this regard, the purpose of this article is to summarize the existing approaches to working with agglomerations in foreign and Russian science and practice. The article shows that in economically developed countries, the main approach to the allocation of agglomerations is functional, in which the area of interaction between the “core” of the agglomeration and its “hinterland” is determined, first of all, by the intensity of pendulum labor migrations; the functional approach is gradually transformed into a network approach, implying the polycentricity of agglomerations. The allocation and delimitation of agglomerations in a country can be based on a unified or individual approach. The article suggests using both options in Russia: a unified approach for improving statistical accounting of changes in the settlement system, which is close to the OECD methodology, and an individual approach for strategic planning and development of inter-municipal cooperation. The advantage of the OECD methodology is that there is no need to rely on the existing territorial boundaries of local self-government, which differ markedly across the subjects of the Russian Federation. It is also proposed to conduct a broad discussion of the approaches to the allocation and delimitation of agglomerations for the law “On urban agglomerations”; to improve the system of statistical accounting for pendulum population migrations, including in population censuses.