Soviet cities: Progress in urbanization in the seventies

While the rise in the proportion of urban dwellers in the Soviet population as a whole has somewhat slowed down, urbanisation has been rapidly continuing in the seventies; it has, however, acquired a certain new character through processes of intensification of urban life. The following of these processes are examined in the paper: concentration of the population in the larger cities, the development of agglomerations and whole systems of urban settlement, the geographical expansion of the large cities' contours. Factors leading to the rise of cities are also undergoing a partial change: their connexion with the growth of material production is becoming more flexible and more mediative; many republican and oblast' capital cities, those centres of administrative, economic-organizational and scientific research functions supported by a highly developed infrastructure are growing more rapidly than other cities.