Regulatory and documentary standards of the sustainable development of urban agglomerations in the Russian Federation

Abstract

The article considers the experience of classification documents of the territorial planning and management of urban agglomerations in the Russian Federation. We have analyzed the documents of the federal level the main aim of which is regulating the processes of formation and development of agglomerations in the country. The documents developed in the regions over the past ten years, which regulate the functioning of all Russian urban agglomerations including laws, concepts, strategies, territorial planning schemes, inter-municipal agreements, and regulations on the activities of coordination councils are considered in detail. A comparative analysis of the documents allowed us to group agglomerations according to the degree of representation of the regulatory and documentary basis. There are five groups of agglomerations that differ in the number of documents and the degree of elaboration of agglomeration issues. The results revealed a significant gap between the selected groups. For agglomerations of the first and second groups we have prepared the complete sets of documentation, which reflect sufficiently the main parameters of agglomerations as integral system formations. For agglomerations included in the fourth group, there are no special documents, there are also some relevant materials in the regional documents of strategic and territorial planning which are characterized by poor elaboration. Agglomerations of the fifth group are not provided with regulatory documents at all, they are not considered as special formations. The analysis can contribute to improving the methodology of agglomeration development, understanding the need to expand and improve approaches to the management of urban agglomerations as integral objects. It is obvious that the urgent problem of sustainable development and functioning of urban agglomerations is the need to develop an innovative management model, its coordination with the regulatory framework of regional management structures, and a clear definition of conceptual and terminological and spatial-structural parameters.