Technologies for designing spatial development of an industrial metropolis

Abstract

Many of industrial cities in the world still retain their unique industrial status, choosing a more complex path of development that requires much greater financial efforts. Specifics of the structure of their economies imposes additional requirements on forecasting spatial location of places of employment. The paper focuses on making a projection of the development of a large metropolis, where industrial sector takes a significant share of the economy. The research specifies the contradictions of the long-term development of the industrial metropolis, which become scenario forks in forecasting, namely, optimisation of industrial and trade and service sectors of the economy, ratio of inertial to innovative vectors of development, variability of migration flows and choice of an agglomeration model. Methodologically, the paper justifies principles of spatial development of an industrial metropolis, such as the principle of polycentricity, the principle of the comfortable environment and the principle of accumulation of territorial capital. The authors describe a toolkit for forecasting spatial location of places of employment based on a set of models (gravity models, models of settlement, models of discrete choice and models for assessing the economic efficiency of territorial capital), which involves the level of localisation of economic activities, density of economic activities, localisation of economic efficiency of space and transport accessibility of places of employment. The study considers the case of Ekaterinburg, one of the largest industrial metropolises in Russia, and justifies the scenarios for its development until 2035, forecasting spatial distribution of industrial and trade and service sectors, the two sectors of the economy competing for investments.