Cluster typology of small and medium-sized towns in the Russian North-West: From formal statuses to structural profiles

The relevance of the study stems from the need to move from universal support measures for small and medium-sized towns in Russia to a differentiated regional policy that takes into account the real diversity of socioeconomic profiles of settlements. The aim of the work is to construct an empirically grounded typology of small and medium-sized towns of the Northwestern Federal District based on a multidimensional cluster analysis of indicators reflecting spatial position, the state of the economy, and the social sphere. The empirical base includes data on 137 towns (130 after cleaning) across nine indicators characterizing economic activity, social and household infrastructure, the quality of the urban environment, and transport accessibility. Due to the strong asymmetry of the distributions of most indicators, logarithmic transformation followed by standardization was applied. Using hierarchical clustering performed in IBM SPSS Statistics, four stable types were identified: 1) “remote industrial centers” (41% of towns), 2) “tourism and service centers” (16%), 3) “comfortable periphery” (38%), and 4) “nearby commuter towns” (5%). For the first time for the macro region, two previously unidentified types were empirically verified: the “comfortable periphery”, uniting both nearby suburbs and remote tourism centers with a high quality of environment and weak development of the economic core, and “nearby commuter towns” – satellite towns of large centers with low local employment and a lack of social infrastructure despite formally high wage and urban environment quality indicators. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the use of multidimensional cluster analysis, which made it possible to identify types of towns that do not coincide with traditional classifications and to reveal hidden imbalances in their socioeconomic development. Based on the resulting typology, differentiated directions of regional policy are formulated for each of the identified town types.