Municipality as a legal structure

The relevance of the study is due to the fact that the constitutional legislator used the legal construction of “municipal formation” to designate the territories of local self-government, without providing tools for their legal construction. First of all, this is due to the lack of a legal definition of the concept of “municipal formation” - it is not in the text of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, nor in Russian legislation at all. There is no legislative definition of a number of other, relatively new terms associated, first of all, with the accelerating process of agglomeration in our country, not only in urban (urbanized) spaces, but also in rural areas, which requires the development of legal aspects of the formation and management of urban and especially rural agglomerations. The article provides an analysis of these processes, as well as justification for the fact that these legal constructions require their substantive definition, including in federal legislation. In addition, the article pays special attention to the temporal retrospective of the territorial organization of local self-government in our country, the subjects and objects of local self-government in the context of the construction of a municipal territorial organization, as well as the issue of understanding the legal nature of the “municipal corporation” in the Russian context and its relationship with the principle of the settlement organization of local self-government.