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This presentation focuses on rationalist aspects of siege warfare in the Nanboku-chō（南北朝）period, or the Northern and Southern Courts period. Although it is popularly believed that samurai were very brave soldiers who did not hesitate to rush the enemy's position, this presentation tries to show their practical methods of minimizing the human toll of war, arguing that such tactics can be found on both attacking and defending sides. When attacking an enemy castle, samurai in this era built multiple confronting castles called mukaijiro（向城）. These castles, however, were not designed to make a frontal attack but intended to cut the enemy’s supply lines. Fearing that they would suffer increased damage, samurai often chose to starve the enemy: they besieged their castle and attacked the enemy's transportation party. They employed the hit-and-run tactics and immediately retreated to their mukaijiro as soon as the enemy's combat troops made a sortie to help their transportation party. The defending side also acted in a rather non-aggressive manner. Reinforcements named usirozume（後詰）the besieged army called for were deployed behind enemy lines. Their main task, however, was not to annihilate the enemy, but to put psychological pressure on them. Indeed, what usirozume did was only to scare the attacking side by blocking their escape route and to convince them of a withdrawal. This presentation concludes that samurai in this period were rationalist who preferred the endurance strategy to the short decisive battle strategy.

The article considers modern urban processes and their impact on people. One such trend is the steady growth of the urban population, which creates serious problems for the city as a system of human life. The city is a complex multi-level organism, this article considers the organization of a comfortable urban environment. To create such an environment, it is necessary to study the peculiarities of the perception of the urban environment by its inhabitants, the study of stress factors of the city and their impact on human health, as well as the influence of the subject-spatial environment on the formation and development of subjective human qualities. The author of the article, comes to the conclusion that for small cities is characterized by the uncertainty of urban space (a combination of urban and rural way of life), the homogeneity of the architectural visual environment, the dominance of one "psychological" area of the city. This marginalization of urban space also creates a marginal territorial identity of citizens.