The current urban planning situation is characterised by the need to justify the reorganisation, integrated development and renovation of the territories of the large cities and megapolises of the Volga region, which requires the development of new methodological approaches to their solution. In this aspect, the analysis of building density distribution, as one of the significant urban planning indicators, makes it possible to create a systematic approach to solving the identified urban planning problems. Using the proposed methodology, based on the application of geographic information systems tools, we have assessed the distribution of building density of such cities of the Volga region as Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod, Cheboksary, Kazan, Ulyanovsk, Togliatti, Samara, Saratov, Volgograd and Astrakhan, illustrated by the mosaic distribution of this parameter. Comparison of the data with the results available in open sources and previously obtained by other methods showed that the proposed methodology allows achieving the necessary measurement accuracy and level of data verification.