ИСТИНА

For centuries, a city and a village have been two different forms of settlement. Nowadays, a rural-urban continuum is formed in many areas. However, the need to establish the specific status of a settlement has not yet lost its significance. Three main aspects should be considered: geographical, historical and legal. The first two take into account spatiotemporal conditions. Set of parameters and specific criteria of a city are changeable in time and depend on socioeconomic situation and settlement pattern. The third legislates the criteria inherent in urban status. In Russia, since the 1990s, they are determined in each federal subject by its own law. Based on the information system of regional legislation a comparative analysis of the criteria of a city by federal subjects was carried out and compared to those that existed in the Soviet period. Then and now, the city is an administrative-territorial unit. No other urban area, e.g. metropolitan area or urban agglomeration, has legal status. However, since 2005, during local self-government reform administrative status of settlements and territories started to depend on their municipal status and was gradually replaced by it. Due to the creation of urban districts, some small cities and suburban settlements became areas within another city. But the biggest changes since 2014 have affected some rural administrative districts, which have been transformed into urban municipalities. It is concluded that these transformations generated by municipal reform, like a boomerang, hit the local self- government itself, depriving local communities in vast rural areas and a large number of small urban settlements of the opportunity to directly participate in the management of their territories.