Methodological Approaches to Positioning Russian Regions in Spatial Development: A Conceptual Review

The article examines methodological foundations for positioning constituent entities of the Russian Federation within spatial development. The starting point is the gap between the strategic description of a region’s role, the statistically observed structure of its economy and its spatial position. Based on a conceptual review of 2019–2025 publications selected through Crossref, OpenAlex, eLibrary, Cyberleninka and relevant journals, the paper systematizes Russian and international approaches to the analysis of regional strategies, indicators of regional socio-economic profile and sectoral specialization and spatial relations. It proposes a framework in which regional positioning is treated as a comparison of three sources: strategy text, observable indicators and spatial context. The aim is to systematize approaches to this problem, identify methodological gaps and outline an agenda for empirical testing; the contribution lies not in a new substantive classification of regions but in a scheme that distinguishes methods by their dominant source of measurement. As a result, four groups of approaches are distinguished — descriptive and text-based, indicator-based, spatial-network and integrated latent-role — and a “source type — level of analysis” matrix is built. Russian literature discusses institutional constraints of strategizing and the heterogeneity of regional documents in detail but rarely links textual, statistical and spatial data in a reproducible procedure, whereas international NLP and spatial ML methods are not adapted to Russian regions. An illustrative micro case of Sverdlovsk Oblast demonstrates the limits of a simple lexical count and the need to test the declaration– observation gap on a regional corpus. A five-direction research agenda is formulated, turning the critique of declarativeness into a testable empirical task.

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