Agglomerated settlement: identifying and registering

Abstract

The article considers approaches to identifying urban agglomerations. It argues that Russian scientists substitute the concepts: they always consider only large metropolitan areas instead of urban agglomerations. As a result the actual number of the agglomerations appears to be much smaller. The existing methods are too complicated, strict and low-tech. The article suggests using the approach of the U. S. statistics based on the allocation of the so-called «standard metropolitan statistical areas». Using this method, «metropolitan» municipal districts were allocated in the regions of Central Russia. The article shows the number of such districts, their share in area and population. Because of the large size of many municipal districts the authors suggest to supplement «metropolitan» method by the index of center accessibility.