| dc.description.abstract | As urban development in the 20th century has become the issue of global concern, more and more new territories have been occupied due to high intensity of the development. International conferences devoted to the regulatory issues of city development held within the current decade (such as HABITAT II held in Istanbul, 1996, ATHENS’98 – in Athens, 1998, URBAN 21 – in Berlin, 2000, and a conference in Brussels, 2001, etc) emphasized the majority of developmental aspects including the great focus on the necessity to further form urban structures with the priority of internal city development looking for more effective and more universal functional uses of the territories, restoration of the existing downtown areas and preservation of their original character. As other post-soviet countries, Lithuania has been also facing the need to reorganize various spheres including urban development. Urban territories have been dangerously expanded, especially during the soviet period, due to the increased general city building-up areas, mostly expressed by the territorial expansion rather than gradual and consistent development (by the use of internal reserves of the city). After the restoration of Lithuanian independence, privatisation, changed character of housing construction, return of land and real estate to the previous owners and increasing value of land under the free market conditions remarkably modified the nature of urban development in Lithuania, at the same time revealing the need for rearrangement of the central city areas. Urban structure transformations made in these areas during the soviet period, at present are named as the inconsistence of the urban fabric, loss of integrity of structure or deformation, which nowadays are not always identified and sometimes even further developed in the same wrong way. Present economic priorities raised by our country encourage for more intensive and effective use of the inner potential of the urban territories taking into consideration the trends of space-saving development in a contemporary European city. However, the presently-set goal for the inner city development does not always follow the concept based on the Western civilization ideology that history and tradition must be the main criteria for each new urban structure development. Considering that the city morphological structure is the entirety of urban forms and arrangement made of separate elements undergoing continuous dynamic process, the key regularity for the morphological structure development is the change (transformation process) preconditioning one or another structure and quality of urban elements. Different scientific works in Lithuania as well as abroad bring up the meaning and significance of consistent transformation of urban structure elements (G.Caniggia, M.R.G.&M.P.Conzen, H.Couclelis, G.Curdes, A.M.Jones, S.Kostof, L.&R.Krier, P.Knox, P.J.Larkham, S.Muratori, C.Sitte, T.Slater, G.Strappa, J.W.R.Whitehand, G.J.Daniulaitis, Z.J.Daunora, V.Jurkštas, T.Grunskis, A.Miškinis, K.J.Mateckis, M.Purvinas, A.Spelskis, K.Šešelgis, J.Vanagas, A.Vyšniūnas, А.В.Иконников, А.Э.Гутнов, Л.Кожаева and others) urban morphology study research recording all transformation processes. As in western countries the urban development has not been discontinued by any shift of social systems, the essential nature of urban morphological structure transformations has been explored. Whereas after facing the change in ideologies, Lithuanian cities have had none of such experience. Here the great value underlies in the territories, where destructive urban structure transformations have occurred under conditions of the plan economy, and nowadays such territories present a great potential for improvement and development of the inner structure of a city. Up to now, such transformations have been failed to analyse in more detail. Thus, in other words, the relevance of the dissertation subject has been determined by the transformation processes occurred due to the shift of social systems and their impact on the urban morphological structure, research and evaluation thereof. | lit |
