Managing agglomeration development in the face of multiple competing goals: challenges and solutions

The emergence of agglomerations as new objects in the public administration system makes it necessary to create and define a set of indicators that will assess their economic growth and development. This management problem justifies the relevance of the study, the aim of which is to assess the information and analytical sufficiency and quality of indicators recommended for use in the elaboration of longterm plans for the socio-economic development of large and largest agglomerations and determined by documents of strategic planning at the federal level, using the example of the Saint Petersburg agglomeration. The methodological basis of the research includes the publications of Russian and foreign scientists and experts on the problem of spatial development and management of urban agglomerations; the current legal framework regulating certain aspects of the national spatial development policy; official statistics data. Based on the results obtained during the study, the following conclusions are drawn: 1) indicators for assessing the economic growth of agglomerations, which are unambiguously defined by federal documents of strategic spatial planning, can be accepted as minimally sufficient and exclusively for the implementation of an extremely concise version of express analysis; 2) the process of institutionalization of urban agglomerations management has not been completed; at the current stage, we are dealing with a “soft” form of both requirements for determining the composition and boundaries of agglomerations and rules for the formation of long-term agglomerations development programs; 3) it is necessary to develop existing experience in creating strategic plans for the development of urban agglomerations. The new methodology should combine modern spatial development concepts that help to find a compromise between state control and the potential of agglomeration management; to overcome the problem of fragmentation of management and the blurring of the institutional structure of agglomeration management; to use the tools of quality economics (metrology, standardization and quality management) in the development of strategies and long-term plans for the development of urban agglomerations.