Factors and Patterns of Current Development of Territorial Units in the Kaliningrad Region

The article examines social and economic factors and laws shaping patterns of development of the regional area over the past 100 years – settlement and land-use systems (retrospective analysis of their variation and mechanisms impacting landscape environment), influence of geopolitical factors (borders: their position, functional types and mechanisms of impacting landscape environment), and principal trends and scenarios in the future development of the Kaliningrad Region. The current settlement system of the Kaliningrad Region is defined by a settlement network of East Prussia established by 1945, which largely followed the pattern of hydrographic network and landscape structure of the territory, by the postwar system of administrative-territorial division and management, by transformation of the regional transport system, by specifics of socioeconomic development of the area shared by all former Soviet Republics, and by current demographic processes. Using the Kaliningrad Region as a case study, some notions of landscape environment as a zone of intersection of areal and network components and their borders were introduced; a number of new directions in the development of geographic lymology were validated.