Approaches to the content of the concept of "urbanized territory" in modern economic research

In recent years, the main vector of scientific research in the field of regional economics has been the development of large localized economic systems, such as agglomerations. At the same time, more and more publications have begun to appear in modern literature, in which an attempt is made to give a basic concept describing what a socio-economic system is. One of the proposed generalizing terms for describing socio-economic systems is the term «urbanized territory». This term is beginning to appear in economics, however, as the researchers note, no qualitative definition of this term has been proposed at the moment. Consequently, there is a need to analyze the authors' publications on the topic of urbanized territories. The methods of publication analysis and classification were used in the study. The study identified the main approaches to the definition of urbanized territories, which were divided into 4 groups. There were also 3 types of urbanized territory (city, region, agglomeration) and 3 main types of territory: urban suburban and rural. As part of the division of the territory into urbanized and non-urbanized, 15 evaluation criteria are proposed, formed into 4 thematic blocks: economic, urban planning, socio-demographic and natural. Based on the results of the analysis of publications, the types of urbanized territories were correlated with existing administrative-territorial units. The largest number of administrative-territorial units belongs to the city as a type of urbanized territory. Only cities of federal significance belong to the region as a type of urbanized territory, and it is impossible to choose an administrative-territorial unit for an agglomeration, since the concept of agglomeration does not hold in the current legislation. Based on the results of the analysis, the author's definition of the term urbanized territory from an economic point of view was proposed.