Trade as a Factor in the Transformation of the Planning Structure of a Chinese Border City

Being formed in accordance with the peculiarities of the geographical, climatic, historical and economic conditions of their origin and territorial growth, such cities have a special morphological organization, which allows us to consider the urban planning specifics of the Far Eastern urban “twins”: Fuyuan (Khabarovsk), Zhaohe (Pokrovka–Bikin), Heihe (Blagoveshchensk), identifying the stages of changing their layout, corresponding to the level of economic development and cultural exchange in coastal settlements located along the demarcation line of China and Russ Based on field studies carried out with the help of a structural analysis of a system object, which is a Chinese border city, the morphological organization of its space is considered and the features of the formation process of a cross-border Russian-Chinese agglomeration are revealed.The use of cartographic and statistical analysis of planning solutions made it possible to analyze the details of the trade infrastructure that determines the formation of border paired cities. Consideration of the trade activity of border towns as a factor conceptually significant for identifying their compositional patterns made it possible to clarify the periodization of the historical transformation of the urban structure of settlements organizing cross-border linear residential construction facilities.