Trio of Young Cities in the Old-Developed Space of the Middle Urals

The history of the Urals as part of Russia is closely related to industrial production. It developed during the main waves of modernization in the country and was accompanied by economic development of the territory, the formation of new villages and cities. A significant stage is the post-war period, when large projects for the extraction of minerals, the construction of energy enterprises, and the nuclear industry were implemented in the Ural region. In particular, in Sverdlovsk oblast in the late 1940–1950s, three small cities arose on a compact territory between the cities of Nizhny Tagil and Serov, in the upper reaches of the Tura River. Nizhnyaya Tura, founded in the middle of the 18th century, acted as a springboard for the construction of Kachkanar and Sverdlovsk-45 (modern city of Lesnoy) and thanks to this developed as a diversified center. This territory, at the present stage composed of three urban districts, should be considered as a group of geographically close settlements of the same administrative rank. Its development reflects all-Russian problems: small towns and urban districts; single-industry and multi-industry cities, polarization and compression of the developed space; internal and external challenges. The article examines the formation of a group of geographically close settlements, the dynamics of the population, the trends of socioeconomic development of the territory in the second half of the 2010s–early 2020s. It is shown that the development of a group of settlements was decisively influenced by resource and defense factors, which at the present stage were supplemented by an innovative factor. Kachkanar, a mining center, is a single-industry town; Lesnoy, center of electrochemical engineering, has the status of a closed administrative-territorial entity; in Nizhnyaya Tura there are enterprises of energy, engineering, construction industry. City-forming enterprises were able to adapt to the realities of the modern economy. The number of inhabitants of the territory is decreasing, in the medium term this trend may negatively affect the age composition of the population, the quality of labor resources.