Spatial development strategy and a new stage of municipal reform in Russia

The spatial organization of the Russian economy, the tasks and instruments of its regulation still remains one of the most difficult segments in the practice of strategic planning in the country. Formally, the situation should have been significantly improved with the adoption of such a document as the Spatial Development Strategy. However, the significant shortcomings inherent in this document (vagueness of purpose, poorly presented institutional and instrumental apparatus, lack of any economic justification of the main target settings, etc.) do not allow today consider it as a working basis for solving a wide range of tasks of planning and management activities. The abovementioned miscalculations of this Strategy should include as well its obvious centralism. This is the desire to present the solution of all problems in the sphere of spatial development of the Russian economy as an exclusive function of the federal center with a very specu-lative idea of what role the sub-federal link of government should play here. The aim of the article is to show that within the framework of the envisaged update of the Spatial Development Strategy it is necessary to significantly expand the un-derstanding of the role of municipal governance, including in connection with significant innovations in the institutional and economic-legal foundations of Russian local self-government.