The Russian Federation: The Economic Rationale Behind Its Formation of Municipal Agglomerations
The article assesses the economic rationale behind the Russian Federation's (RF) plans to set up municipal agglomerations, indicating that they would play a major role in regional development. Pundits predict that by 2025 about 80% of the world's population will dwell in large urban centers including metropolitan areas and megacities. The paper opines that the popular concentration in such territorial structures would transform them into sources of regional growth. At this stage, the critique refocuses on regional-level agglomerations in the RF. Implementation of these projects, the document relates, would help resolve some of the regional issues by enhancing socio-cultural services, offering more advanced levels of engineering, and improving the populations' general quality of life. In urbanized settings such as Kemerovo (Kemerovo Oblast), the critique notes that present conditions are relevant for building agglomerations. Kemerovo — with the Urals' greatest number of urban dwellers — is contemplating the construction of two agglomerations: Novokuznetsk and Kemerovo. These projects, which are expected to be comparable in potential industrial and agricultural scope, would have an economic impact on the region's municipal areas and rural settlements. In the long term, the agglomerations could cut the size of municipal governments, optimize residential outlays, and improve the infrastructure for communal services (by unifying the same economic undertakings at urban and regional level). They might also increase the investment attractiveness of metropolitan areas as a whole, and raise the market value of the land. Subsequently, the review returns its focus to the urban implications of agglomerations. The commentary says the aforementioned agglomerations also could resolve core municipal problems by replacing the ongoing reliance on industrial production, enlarging the range of transportation, and developing recreational bases. The blueprint has, in conclusion, provided a comprehensive study of RF urban agglomerations that also considers the economic and geographic consequences of their development.