settlement systems

Using the example of several districts of the Middle Angara region, the changes in the system of rural settlements in the taiga zone of the Irkutsk region in the period from the first All-Russian Population Census in 2002 after the collapse of the Soviet Union to the last one in 2021 are revealed. The system-dynamic analysis also touched upon the period of formation of regional settlement systems, which fell during the Soviet period and played a major role in their genesis.

The article examines the application of topological concepts for analysing the structure and assessing the compactness of a regional settlement system. A methodology is proposed that adapts classical topological invariants to evaluate real transport-planning networks using OpenStreetMap data, taking into account physical-geographical and legislative constraints. Instead of abstract node connectivity indices in the settlement system graph, a new operational indicator – the “exit index” – is introduced.