Strategic cities in the modern map of Russia

The purpose of the studyis to collect and analyze the complete database of social and economic development strategies of Russian cities with the population exceeding 100 thousand people approved by local regulatory acts in the period between mid-2014 (that is, after the adoption of the Federal Law “On Strategic Planning in the Russian Federation”) and the end of 2019. The task is challenging because despite the presence of the public federal state register of strategic documents in Russia, it does not contain complete and accurate information about documents at the municipal level. The studied range includes 168 cities. The search studies official websites of city administrations and legislative bodies as well as other open sources. Many documents are found on the websites of legal reference systems or in regional databases of strategic documents. As a result of the research, the database of documents under study includes 94 new strategies approved in 87 cities, which is about 51.8% of all cities in the studied group. In addition, 21 strategies had been updated and so only 60 cities out of 168 did not have an updated (in the sense of compliance with the Federal Law) strategy at the end of 2019. The analysis of the territorial distribution of cities that approved strategies after the adoption of the law shows the relative leadership of the cities of the Ural Federal District, the Siberian Federal District and the Far Eastern Federal District on strategic planning. On the basis of the results of studying the dynamics of approving strategic documents, the authors propose an updated periodization of strategic planning at the city level: Stage 1 - from 1997 to 2006 (“innovative strategic planning”); Stage 2 - from 2007 to 2014 (“mass proactive strategic planning”); Stage 3 - from 2014 to 2018 (“legal strategic planning”).