Intraregional Population Migration in Russia: Suburbs Outperform Capitals

Intraregional migration in modern Russia plays a crucial role in the implementation of people’s life plans. It also contributes to spatial configuration changes. Every second registered resettlement within Russia occurs within the borders of the regions. However, nothing is known about intraregional migration, except for its total volume and role in changing the population of individual municipalities. The statistical information collected by the authors on long-term intraregional migration for 1265 municipalities in 39 regions of Russia (51.4% of the country’s population) for 2017 made it possible to generate arrival, departure, and net migration matrices for each region. This made it possible to analyze the intraregional migration flows and intraregional redistribution of the population between regional centers, suburban municipalities, and regional periphery. The analysis revealed that the population movement between regional centers, their suburbs and other municipalities in all intraregional migration approximately corresponds to their share in the population. All types of municipalities are equally involved in migration. There is an intensive migration exchange between regional centers and their suburbs. Regional centers are not only inferior to the suburbs in terms of the intensity of migration growth: 80% of regional centers lose their population in the migration exchange with their own suburbs. In general, the redistribution of the population within the framework of intraregional migration in almost all the studied regions contributes to an increase in the concentration of the population in the agglomeration zone formed by regional centers and their suburbs. In some regions, there is another “zone” of population concentration, as a rule, much smaller: the sub-centers represented by large cities located at a considerable distance from regional centers. They form their own zones of positive net migration with the nearest peripheral municipalities. In most cases, this migration allows sub-centers to only compensate for the migration outflow to other regions of the country or to their own regional centers.

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