Polycentric Suburban Zone of a Monocentric Agglomeration: Settlement Pattern in the Environment of Moscow

The evolution of the Moscow region, coupled with the growing complexity of socioeconomic ties, increasing spatial contrasts, and expanding dacha suburbanization, is changing traditional approaches to studying the metropolitan area and demands the development of fundamentally new approaches to analyzing its internal structure. Today, the Moscow urban agglomeration is one of the largest settlement structures in the world. Its core—Moscow—serves as the undisputed dominant feature, guiding thousands of urban and rural settlements. However, the apparent homogeneity of the suburban zone conceals a wide variety of local settlement patterns emerging within it, the examination and typology of which is the focus of this article. The author’s methodology utilizes a graph-analytical approach to examining mobile operator databases on commuter flows. Using the Leiden clustering algorithm, the authors identified objectively formed settlement clusters and identified them with different morphological settlement structures: small urban agglomerations and autonomous centers. This detailed decomposition aims to shed light on the internal structure of the second tier of settlement systems, which has been underestimated by contemporary Russian geo-urban studies. Furthermore, the authors’ proposed approach helps move beyond the traditional center-periphery view of the Moscow urban agglomeration, focusing on the socioeconomic ties within the suburban zone that shape its potential for polycentric development.

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