Possible external validation for Natural Roads

[AlexanderTyan]

Thank you for presenting! I find the city size persistence across such a long period, despite the industrial progress across centuries, to be a fascinating observation. This made me wonder if human changes to topography across time present an opportunity to validate the natural roads hypothesis further. So if cities tend to appear and grow more at the natural road nodes and the location of the roads and nodes is a function of topography, what if we could look at geographic locations where humans have made "significant" changes to topography; for instance, an artificial channel connecting two bodies of water or a major mountain tunnel and whether such changes systematically alter city birth and growth across time, as the hypothesis would suggest.

[rodrigovaldes]

This is a great hypothesis! But difficult to test. Idk if there are many of these cases around there.