Ethological dynamics in diorama environments

Cities and roads are the fundamental infrastructures that human society has developed. Their organizations are complex phenomena involved with many natural and social factors: business, commerce, transport, politics, diplomacy, culture, landscape, climate, hydrosphere, natural resources, etc. Geographical landscape appears to be the key factor among them, but most previous modelling studies assumed an ideally homogeneous space because of so-called `for the sake of simplicity'. Here we propose a working hypothesis that co-evolving dynamics of cities and roads defined on the space of geographical landscapes reproduce the outline of real-world spatial patterns of them. To examine this hypothesis, using high resolution digital topographic databases, we evaluate the distance between locations on the natural terrains by least cost path analysis, and define a dynamical system of the cites and roads on the evaluated space, and compare the stationary state of the system with a census. As a case study on Hokkaido region in Japan, we will evaluate the effects of the natural geographical factors on the emergence of cities and roads, and we will explore urban environmental adaptation strategies that look 1,000 years into the future by preparing a diorama environment that assumes climate change and sea level rise due to global warming.