2021 Issue №3

Social innovations are important for solving the problems of rural devel­opment, since due to the intensification of polarization processes, the backlog of living conditions in rural areas from cities increases. Based on the statisti­cal reporting and agricultural censuses, the article assesses the changes and spatial distribution of production, social and demographic processes in rural areas of the Kaliningrad region over the past three decades. The differences in the situation in the west (in the rapidly developing Kaliningrad agglomera­tion) and in the lagging behind eastern municipalities are shown. Social inno­vations are seen as a way to solve the problems of peripheral territories.

The role of tourism in the development of rural areas could be confirmed, on the one hand, by the income received from this activity by the owners of ru­ral estates and guest houses. On the other hand, tourism, and above all its na­ture-oriented forms, contribute to the sustainable development of the territory. The aim of the research is to identify the resource potential of the rural areas in the coastal municipalities of the Kaliningrad region for organizing recrea­tional routes as one of the promising forms of rural tourism. As part of the re­search, a number of expeditions were organized to the Slavsk and Polessk mu­nicipalities, where an inventory of the existing infrastructure was carried out. Based on the results, a map of the tourism objects and infrastructure was drawn up. The work has both theoretical and practical value.

In the Kaliningrad region, as well as in other regions of Russia, the cen­ter-peripheral model of economic development directly affects the transfor­mation of the regional settlement system. Over the past 10 years, the dynam­ics of the population in rural settlements of the region has been determined by agglomeration and transport-geographical factors. The analysis of changes in the population of 1,068 settlements in the region (excluding cities and urban-type settlements) and their transport and geographical position resulte in con­clusions on the state of the settlement system both in the region as a whole and in the context of individual municipalities. The main conclusion is that the relatively small size of the region and high transport connectivity (along with a high level of economic development) generally smooth out negative so­cio-demographic processes, making the gap between agglomeration and pe­ripheral municipalities not as significant as initially thought.

The coastal area of Russia is a dynamically developing region of the coun­try, the geopolitical and geostrategic importance of which has grown significant­ly in recent decades due to changes in the external conditions of development. The differences in the socio-economic development of the coastal area of Russia are reflected in the numerous gradients of the migration situation, the study of which determines the purpose of this article. The study relies on typology, statis­tical and general scientific methods as well as on the Rosstat data on interre­gional and international migration of the population in the coastal regions of Russia at the regional and local levels in 1993—2018. Analysis of the transfor­mation of the migration situation in each of the coastal regions of Russia over the entire post-Soviet history has shown the presence of fairly stable core regions of attraction of migrants in the basins of the Baltic and Black Seas. Durng the study period they increased their migration attractiveness. Areas of outflow of migrants, formed mainly within the Pacific, Arctic and Caspian Seas basins, for the most part demonstrate a decrease in the intensity of migration loss, mainly due to international immigration. Here, the role of the emerging and most dy­namically developing local centers of attraction of the migrants is extremely im­portant for improving the migration situation. They can trigger the process of coastalization and extend it to the neirbouring areas.

The study examines the spatial and temporal distribution of global scien­tific knowledge on social innovation in rural areas. It is possible to assess the scientific productivity of a particular thematic area using the methods of sci­entometrics, which make it possible to compare the achievements of countries, regions and individual researchers, as well as to organize data on the infor­mation flow of scientific publications. The Scopus abstract database was taken as the data source, and the VOSviewer program was used for visualization. The study identified knowledge generation centers and the dynamics of their scientific productivity, as well as thematic clusters that include the seven most frequent aspects of social innovation in rural areas, in particular, rural development, digitalization, social entrepreneurship, ecosystem sustainability, rural community, helping the elderly, poverty.