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. The development and progressive changes in traffic intensities are presented in view of the resulting impact on the formation of the landscape structure. The research data confirm the importance of transport as a force determining landscape changes, and they indicate that while railroad accessibility embodied a crucial factor up to the 1970s, the more recent decades were characterized by a gradual shift to road transport.

In this paper we evaluate the development trends in the conurbation of the cities of Martin and Vrútky which is situated in the northern part of central Slovakia. Two time frames were chosen for our study. The first is the period from 1993 to 2003. It is the period before the accession of the Slovak republic to the European Union. The second period is from 2003 to 2016after Slovakia´s accession to the European Union. The aim of this paper is to identify and evaluate development trends in the conurbation of the cities of Martin and Vrútky based on the comparison of land use changes over the last 23 years. We discovered that there were more significant changes in the first period (1993-2003). The strongest development trend in this area was afforestation which covered and area of 733.12 ha.

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