Urban policy in Russia: a geographic perspective.

The author "describes current features of the Russian urban settlement system, recounts erroneous planning practices of the past, and prescribes changes for the improvement of settlement planning in the future. [Included] are tables, disaggregated to the economic regional level, showing spatial variations in the number of new cities registered over the period 1927-1989. In [a] modification of conventional former Soviet thinking, a case is made in favor of such processes as polarization of space, agglomeration, spontaneous transformation of urban economic profiles, and place-based rather than norm-based planning."