Structural Transformations of the Municipal Space: Substantiation of Expediency and Evaluation of Efficiency

Abstract

The article discusses a set of scientific and applied problems about the meaning and bases, content, and consequences of structural transformations of the municipal space. Interest in these problems is caused by the need to search for reasons for the increased variability of the structural organization of this space, which throughout the post-Soviet period has not only undergone individual situational changes, but has repeatedly been the object of intensive and ubiquitous targeted state (at federal and regional levels) transformations that have had a contradictory nature of the reciprocating pulsations according to the reform–counterreform scheme. A retrospective analysis of the mass transformations in the territorial organization of local self-government that consistently took place in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s leads to such conclusions. The author clarifies the reasons for the three quantitative and structural transformations opposite in meaning and fundamental in their consequences over such a short period, the requisite criteria (economic, financial, legal, etc.) for which formed the basis for the choice of spatial configuration variants, which rapidly replaced one another and were the results of changes. Russian processes of spatial transformation of the system of local self-government are compared with similar foreign practice. The fundamental possibility and availability of theoretical bases for formulating and solving the problem of rational determination of the spatial scale of municipalities (configuration of the municipal space) are clarified, and a conceptual approach, criteria, and methodological bases for systemic assessment of the prerequisites and efficiency of structural transformations of the municipal space are discussed.