Methodological aspects of classification for small and medium towns

The article deals with problem aspects in classification of small and medium-sized towns in the Russian Federation. The author views the main problem of the approaches applied to the typology of towns in the lack of uniform criteria for their classification and institutional legal framework support.Today, the towns are being studied by representatives of different industries, and there is an urgent necessity in an appropriate scientific discipline able to generalize the initial blocks of the resulted data. It is substantiated a necessity of legislative definition for the town notion concept, for further categorization of the localities into typological units, allocating small and medium-sized towns.