After the
Napoleonic Wars and the 1815
Congress of Vienna, the Prussian lands were re-arranged into ten provinces, three of them—
East Prussia,
West Prussia and the
Grand Duchy of Posen—beyond the borders of the
German Confederation. The provinces were internally divided into up to six
Regierungsbezirke and further into the districts on local level, headed by a
Landrat administrator. The districts usually took the name of their capital (
Kreisstadt), seat of the administrative office (
Landratsamt). A typical district had a rough diameter of , in order to ensure that even the remotest villages could be reached by
carriage within a day, though few were circular in shape. In some areas, larger districts were split into two smaller districts or were resized with neighboring ones. Larger cities usually retained their self-administration according to traditional
German town law and formed exempt
urban districts (
Stadtkreise) comparable to
independent cities. Often these cities also served as the administrative seat responsible for the smaller towns and villages incorporated into the surrounding rural districts, which then were called (
Landkreise) for the purpose of differentiation (e.g.
Stadtkreis and
Landkreis Königsberg). The number of urban districts increased in the course of the
Industrial Revolution and the following
urbanization from the 1830s onwards. ==See also==