Introduction. Urban development of regional settlement systems depends on the administrative and territorial structure of the Russian Federation. The establishment of new types of municipalities, such as urban and municipal regions, municipal districts, in which urban and rural settlements function, is the evidence of modernization. Prospects of reorganization of regional systems also depend on the planning of territories of special economic zones as drivers of local changes in the regional systems and their individual elements. However, these prospects ensure their integrated development. To improve the manageability of regional settlement systems, it is reasonable to evaluate the pace of local urban development processes and forecast their consequences.
Materials and methods. To solve the problems of the study, the authors used methods of system-structural analysis, cause-effect analysis, operational analysis, theoretical and cartographic modeling. They also took advantage of the official statistics, space planning documents of the RF subjects, open-access cartographic sources, published results of research projects implemented by foreign and domestic researchers.
Results. Production areas with special modes of industrial specialization have been intensively forming in the regions of the European part of Russia for the past 15 years. Generalization and systematization of this practice show the same basic conditions of their formation, including such indicators as the area of the territory, the population size and density. Calculated extremums and average values of these indicators can be used to make a comparative assessment of the systems as a whole and their individual elements. Analysis of the sequence of the process of urban-planning arrangement of such territories, features of their location, character of functional and spatial communications, development potential, the state of belonging to the stage of establishment, various land use characteristics allow identifying basic classes and prerequisites of their involvement in the processes of intermunicipal and interregional interaction.
Conclusions. New properties and characteristics of regional settlement systems, conditioned by features of their administrative and territorial structure, have been identified. They are expressed in different states of regional systems described by the principle patterns: concentration, rarefaction and turbulence of urban planning processes. They determine prospective forms of reorganization of regional systems, based on the configuration and parameters of contact-junction zones of municipal and regional levels in the formats of conceptual substantiation and options of land use planning.
