Future comes when the present turns into the past: from gravitational to network spatial structures

Success of spatial planning and urban growth management depends on our knowledge about cities and systems of settlements. Dominating in the relevant domestic theory views are continue to be almost unchanged since eighties of the 20th Century and can be described with the gravitational model. General overview of spatial development processes provides opportunity to identify at least two patterns of spatial organisation associated with the subsequent stages of settlement systems’ structural development. Structural organisation at the earliest stage can be described with linear-nodal model. Lately this pattern of spatial organisation had been substituted by gravitational structures. Establishment of such structures were predefined by establishment of centralised mechanisms of territorial management. Within every stage of structural development three phases are identified: origin and development (1), sustainability (2) and destruction (3). The first phase of origin and development overlaps the last phase of the previous stage. The contemporary period is characterised as the last phase of gravitational structural organisation and transition to the new pattern of spatial organisation on the basis of network model.