Relationships between fractal road and drainage networks in Wuling mountainous area: Another symmetric understanding of human-environment relations

Abstract

Symmetrical relationships between humans and their environment have been referred to as an extension of symmetries in the human geographical system and have drawn great attention. This paper explored the symmetry between physical and human systems through fractal analysis of the road and drainage networks in Wuling mountainous area. We found that both the road and drainage networks reflect weak clustering distributions. The evolution of the road network shared a significant self-organizing composition; while the drainage network showed obvious double fractal characteristics. The geometric fractal dimension of the road network was larger than that of the drainage network. In addition; when assigned a weight relating to hierarchy or length; neither the road network nor drainage network showed a fractal property. These findings indicated that the fractal evolution of the road network shared certain similarities with fractal distribution of the drainage network. The symmetry between the two systems resulted from an interactive process of destroying symmetry at the lower order and reconstructing symmetry at the higher order. The relationships between the fractal dimensions of the rural-urban road network; the drainage network and the urban system indicated that the development of this area was to achieve the symmetrical isomorphism of physical-human geographical systems.