Estonian and Latvian rural inhabitants enjoy many factors enhancing the quality of life, such as the peace and quiet of the countryside, fresh food and rural activities. However, these benefits are insufficient to overcome poor employment prospects in rural areas. Place-shaping practices have transformative powers that are instrumental in achieving sustainable change in communities.

During the last decade, the concept of urban resilience has been increasingly implemented in urban planning, with the main aim to design urban development strategies. Urban resilience is a multi-dimensional and dynamic concept. When applied to urban planning, it consists of studying cities as complex socio-economic systems. Municipalities are currently working to undertake appropriate actions to enrich the resilience of cities. Moreover, several difficulties concern the evaluation of the impacts over time of the strategies designed to enhance urban resilience.

The paper evaluates landscape development, land-use changes, and transport infrastructure variations in the city of Martin and the town of Vrútky, Slovakia, over the past 70 years. It focuses on analyses of the landscape structures characterizing the study area in several time periods (1949, 1970, 1993, 2003); the past conditions are then compared with the relevant current structure (2018). Special attention is paid to the evolution of the landscape elements forming the transport infrastructure.