While planning an expansion of Lithuanian villages, appropriate methodology is lacking of quality assessment of populated areas, which would allow evaluating the connection between cities and rural suburban areas. It is needed as the changes are affecting both the one and the other functionality. The opportunity to rectify appropriate indicators and potential residents’ opinions would allow improving the quality assessment of rural and urban environments. This therefore would allow reaching better future decisions in terms of strategic territorial planning. The objective of the research – the quality of the suburban rural residential areas in terms of its functionality, spatial organization (living environment) and its contribution while formatting the network of suburban rural areas. The aim of the research – to improve general quality of the plans for urban and rural residential areas including the assessment of interaction level between the urban and rural areas systems. This doctoral thesis consists of these parts: introduction, three chapters, conclusions and the list of used literature including the list of the author’s publications on this topic. The first chapter is devoted to the literature review. Previous studies which are relevant to the chosen topic were overviewed in this part of the paper. The second section is devoted to the creation of the integrated quality assessment model of conceptual urban and rural living environment. The objective indicators and subjective views of potential residents are combined in this model. The third chapter is devoted to the conceptual model’s practical application, there multi-criteria model called TOPSIS_A was used in rural areas which are located next to the main Lithuanian cities: Vilnius, Kaunas and Klaipeda. TOPSIS_A was used in order to evaluate the quality of the development and living environment in the rural areas which are located in suburbs of the major cities. Based on the results of the evaluation, potential development plan was created for the residential suburban areas. The scenario, which was based on the assessment of development of rural residential areas, was compared with current demographical trends and the metropolitan areas master plans. The author of this research has written ten scientific articles about the results of this research. Two of them were published in scientific journals which are refereed in Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge (ISI Web of Science) database;another two were published in international conferences’ publications refereed in Thomson Routers database Proceedings; two articles in other international databases of scientific publications and four were published in other scientific publications.