St. Petersburg Metropolitan Region: Problems of Planning Coordination and Spatial Development

The paper is devoted to problems of ensuring balanced and sustainable development of a very specific and important metropolitan region of the Russian Federation - the region of St Petersburg and surrounding it Leningrad Oblast. St.Petersburg (City) and Leningrad Oblast (Region) are both constituent entities of the Russian Federation and part of North-West Federal District. The City and the Region are connected with each other by thousands of various relationships: historical, cultural, socio-demographic, economic, labor, transport and administrative. For a long period of time, the City and the Region were part of a single administrative-territorial entity and had common governance bodies that applied a common approach to their development. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 the system that ensured consistent management of the development of the City and Region was destroyed. However, no system was created that could be used to coordinate the development of the City and the Region. In the last two decades, problems between the City and the Region arise increasingly often, many of which cannot be solved on the basis of agreed positions of both parties. The paper is considering main problems which needs a coordinated approach: 1) competition for investment, human resources, federal infrustructure projects, taxes and other budget revenues etc. 2) coordination of spatial development plans and land use regulations, transportation networks development, environmental, educational, recreational and migration policies, housing construction. On the basis of the analysis of statistics and international best practices recommendations are formulated to improve the efficiency of the governance of the region, paying special attention to St Petersburg Metropolitan Area, which includes a number of municipalities, located in Leningrad Oblast. The paper includes discussion of common interests and background for increased cooperation and integration between St.Petersburg and Leningrad Region and main areas of improving efficiency of interaction between the two entities at the present stage.