The global trends of the modern development of urban planning activities are directly related to the theoretical and practical foundations of spatial planning of territories. In Russia today, the acute question is the interrelationships and contradictions of spatial and territorial views on the development of cities. There a lot of official discussions of the prospects for the implementation of such documents as a strategy or concept of spatial development in the professional research and scientific design community. The questions of master plan for the development of the territory, a comprehensive scheme for creating a comfortable environment are increasingly being raised also. The necessity and opportunity of replacing the master plan of the city with a spatial planning (or their symbiosis) is on the discussion at the federal level. The relevance of the research is determined by the need in the Russian theory and practice of urban planning to develop scientific and methodological foundations of spatial planning of urban development. The purpose of the work is to determine the types and role of spatial planning documents in the system of modern domestic urban planning activities. © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).