ИСТИНА

The formation of large megacities is a process which largely implemented "spontaneously" - beyond the direct impact of administrative decisions and development strategies. The true nature of «crawl urbanization» manifests itself in three simultaneous processes : an expanding of the «regional city» boundaries, due to the functioning of an economic power «funnel2 and a special transport system operation, changing in the spatial configuration of the «ecological footprint» as a result of increasing exploitation of the surrounding areas resources and natural and cultural landscapes ecoservices, transformation of «urban fabric» types characterized by different functional and morphological parameters. On the one hand, these processes (for a long time) are already the subject of GIS, which led to the creation of recognized web-resources, such as the Atlas of Urban Expansion is widely used for the study and typology of urban agglomerations, but until now is little known in Russia. The Atlas contains information about the spatial development of the 200 largest world`s cities, including Moscow. We will show how the use of these data allows to gain an independent analysis of the interaction between the city and region, to identify the general nature of urbanization and to fix the outlines of a truly emerging metropolitan area On the other hand, the development and further improvement of so-called open data - for example, the resource OSM - opens up new opportunities for a better understanding of the rather complex patterns of urban fabric transformation and the associated changing qualities of the urban environment and urban landscapes. In particular, within the framework of the presented work, an attempt was made to evaluate the current and forecast potential of the ecological services of Big Moscow based on data from Open Street Map data, previously prepared by converting to the so-called "urban codes" - land use types encoded in Urban Atlas mode