The technique of assessing the cities’ competitiveness by means of quantitative and qualitative parameters

In this article the authors propose a new approach to working out the strategies of cities’ development, to identifying the additional opportunities for improving the competitiveness of the regions through the use of integral evaluation of the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of small, medium, and large cities. The cities can experience sustainable growth only in a favorable environment with effective economic policy. The classification of cities is one of the main ways to investigate and systematize such social and economic phenomenon as a city. The competitiveness of the city has a direct impact on the quality of its development. The use of experience of cities-counterparts and its adaptation to concrete specific conditions may become one of the methods for identifying the promising directions of the sustainable development of territories. By analyzing the existing classifications of cities the authors revealed the prevelance of cities’ assessment by a number of residents (medium, large, small). Each category has its own criteria, as well as the appropriate classification of cities by functional facilities. In other words, the existing classifications of cities are either quantitative or qualitative in nature, and, therefore, they have a number of disadvantages and shortcomings. In order to create a single classification which would unite all the indicators, the authors offer a classification matrix of cities which includes the quantitative indicator (population size) and the qualitative indicator (functional affiliation). To clear out the mechanism of using this matrix, the authors study small, medium and large cities of Russia: each quadrant of the matrix corresponds to the city in the terms of coordinates. The developed method will provide the ability to visually organize the city, to identify the nearest competitors, which, in turn, will allow borrowing an effective model of development, in accordance with the size and functions of the city and provide an opportunity for building an optimal strategy of sustainable development of territories in the long run.