The Largest Urban Agglomerations of the Ural Federal District: Comparative Analysis

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of urban agglomeration processes in the territory of the Ural Federal District. The purpose of the article is to assess the development of the largest urban agglomerations of the Ural Federal District. The authors included in the sample three urban agglomerations, the core of which are the capital centers of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation located in the Urals: Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk and Tyumen urban agglomerations. The research methods are fundamental research methods (abstraction and generalization, systematic approach, structural and functional method, comparative analysis method, etc.), as well as technical analysis methods (classical analysis, indicator method, etc.). The authors rely on statistics provided by Rosstat, official sites of the administrations of the regions and cities under study, as well as Yandex maps. The most developed from an agglomeration point of view is the Yekaterinburg urban agglomeration, followed by the Chelyabinsk agglomeration, and, finally, the Tyumen agglomeration is in third place. In general, the analysis of urban agglomeration processes demonstrated that the latter are very unevenly developed in the territory of the Ural Federal District, which indicates an insufficient connection between the space adjacent to the border between Europe and Asia. The calculation of indicators showed a «problem field» of agglomeration processes characteristic of the Ural Federal District space: for the Yekaterinburg agglomeration there is a significant spread in the population of a large city and small settlements in terms of population, which indicates uneven resettlement; in the Chelyabinsk region — a decrease in population growth of the entire agglomeration; in the Tyumen agglomeration — a low value of the centralization coefficient of the «core» of the agglomeration, the agglomeration coefficient, the agglomeration index, the population development index. The authors made recommendations for the authorities of the macroregion aimed at strengthening the space occupying a middle position on the Eurasian continent.