Urban cellular automata with irregular space of proximities

We propose an operational approach to incorporate complex urban geography into urban land-use cellular automata (CA) models. The local interactions in the standard urban CA models are habitually based on the ‘as the crow flies’ spatial distances among cells. This is hardly a plausible assumption if the local interactions and influences among places are to depend on their mutual proximity in terms of accessibility to humans, 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 proximities. In this paper, as a contribution in that direction, we lay down a possible CA modelling approach, discuss a few toy examples and present an application on the city of Heraklion in Crete.