Urban Cellular Automata with Irregular Space of Proximities: A Case Study

Local interactions and influences among places in a city depend on their mutual distances in terms of accessibility to humans. That distance is hardly Euclidean, since it depends on the urban geography shaped, among others, by the network of transportation and pedestrian networks. Very little operational efforts have been undertaken in CA-based urban modelling to investigate and provide a more coherent treatment of such irregular geometries. In this paper, we propose an operational approach entirely based on cellular automata techniques for modelling of such accessibility arising from complex urban geography. We further present an example application on the city of Heraklion in Crete.