Official and “Real” Cities: The Case Study of Moscow Metropolitan Area

— This article considers methodological approaches to delimitation of cities and towns and criteria of such delimitation in the case of a large urban agglomeration based on the example of the Moscow metropolitan area. It is shown that despite some level of imprecision, mobile network operator data is a useful tool for identifying “real” cities and towns. The study uses a 500 × 500 m cell as a basic territorial unit, which helps to delineate the borders of cities and towns closer to their “physical” limits and also obtain more accurate population values for these cities and towns. The results of testing several approaches to delimitation of city/town borders show that the best performance is achieved with a method based on the indicators of population size in continuous residential development zones (over 15 000 people) and population density (over 1000 people/km2). Current and former borders of settlements are used as a supplementary criterion: despite their subjective nature, these borders have an observable barrier function. Application of the proposed methodology to the Moscow region resulted in identification of 92 “real” cities and towns in the area, as opposed to 76 officially recognized cities and towns (excluding Moscow in its old borders). Along with some of the official cities and towns, the delineated “real” cities and towns include large urban-type settlements and villages, cities and towns that are officially considered part of other settlements, and conglomerates of several small settlements, including some on the territory of New Moscow. The belt-sector structure of the locations of “real” towns and cities replicates the pattern of the urban settlement network with an increased concentration in short-distance suburbs and in the eastern sector. Compared to mobile network operator data, the data recorded by the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) for both the identified “real” and the official cities and towns of the area has lower population values for hubs located under 40 km from the Moscow Automobile Ring Road and higher population values for remote cities and towns.