Territorial Structure of Digital Economy of Russia: Preliminary Delimitation of ‘Smart’ Urban Agglomerations and Regions

The fourth industrial revolution will create a new digital economy in Russia, where ‘smart’ objects (factories, transport, roads, buildings, etc.) with artificial intelligence systems will dominate. There are currently no studies on identifying territorial structure of the future digital economy of Russia. However, the existing euphoria of creation of ‘smart’ cities and regions is not based on studying the territorial structure of digital economy, which leads to unsubstantiated claims of ubiquity of new technologies. No scientific reasoning is made about the fact that the borders of digital (‘smart’) agglomerations and regions match the borders of territorial subdivisions of Russia. The lack of studies on substantiating of digital regions borders is not a uniquely Russian problem. The issue with digital agglomerations and regions is explained by the lack of a univocal and clear criterion of delimitation (establishing of borders). The author makes an assumption that the future territorial structure will be represented by ‘smart’ urban agglomerations and regions based on the inertia of the existing system of settlement and agglomeration economy. The work establishes that the most critical parameter of managing ‘smart’ objects is the signal delay in telecommunication nets. The author suggests establishing borders of digital agglomerations and regions based on the isochrones of delay of 1 and 10 milliseconds with corrections made when getting too close to or too far away from the regional centers. The author calculated the signal delay between 1112 Russian cities, establishes 43 digital agglomerations and 45 regions. The results can be used in creating the strategy of developing of digital economy in Russi