The article substantiates the necessity of coordinating general plans with social processes in cities. It also explores the opportunities for enriching the data used for urban planning by employing social research methods. The main methods of sociological support for different stages of urban planning activities, from agglomeration and urban planning to monitoring of conflict situations at the construction stage, are presented. The data from a sociological study conducted in the cities of the southern Moscow region demonstrate the potential for forming a distributed agglomeration by increasing connectivity and diversifying settlement functions.