Foundation and Development of the Regular Saint Petersburg Agglomeration in the 1703 to 1910s

Abstract

The relevance of the topic of the article is predetermined by the beginning of the professional development of the project of territorial development of the Saint Petersburg agglomeration for the period up to the 2030s. The article briefly describes the stages of the historical formation of the agglomeration, starting from the 1700s to the beginning of the 20th century, in those centuries when it was still the Russian metropolitan agglomeration. During the research on this topic, an integrated town-planning, territorialfunctional, natural-landscape, socio-economic analysis was used, which combined the materials of a parallel study of historical cartography and archival materials. The main results were the conclusions that from the early 1700s, on the basis of the rural settlement system that had existed for centuries in these territories, the purposeful crystallization was carried out around Saint Petersburg with its principles of construction as the “ideal” capital city of the grandiose “regular type” urban agglomeration, which included three areas-belts: “external”, “middle”, and “nearby” (as areas of intensive agglomeration), in total geographically located from Yaroslavl (in the east) to Riga (in the west). By the 1910s, the nearby agglomeration belt (area of intensive agglomeration) united the structures of the encircling (around Saint Petersburg and the largest settlements and complexes), linear (along radial and ring highways) and nodal (around particular large settlements) structure. By this time, the formation of four subagglomerations in the spatial structure of this agglomeration was already underway: Kronstadt, Petergof, Tsarskoye Selo, Sestroretsk. This variant of the territorial formation and the unique structuring of the metropolitan Saint Petersburg agglomeration, with the parallel development of subagglomerations, are nonstandard for the world history of urban planning. The materials of the article can be useful for historians of urban planning, as well as for modern townplanners and urbanists. Keywords—spatial development in the 1700s to 1910s; “ideal” metropolitan Saint Petersburg and the “regular” metropolitan Saint Petersburg agglomeration; three belts of the agglomeration; subagglomerations; Kronstadt; Petergof; Tsarskoye Selo; Sestroretsk