Territorial structure of the urban system in the northern sverdlovsk oblast

The article investigates the possibility of agglomerative relations in the northern Sverdlovsk oblast. The main approaches to defining and delimiting urban and industrial–urban agglomerations in the domestic literature are considered. For the urban system of the northern Sverdlovsk oblast, the dynamics of the population size from 1926 through 2010 is analyzed, and the rates of urban agglomeration development for different years are calculated. The nature of current production and nonproduction relations between cities is considered in detail. It is shown that this urban system is characterized by many traits of an urban agglomeration, although it does not correspond to the formal criteria thereof. Special attention is given to identifying the center (“capital”) of this territory, for which, among other things, field observations and interviews, conducted by the authors’ team, were used.