Process

Articles

• Spatial diffusion
  15 December 2004, by Th. St.-J.

  Diffusion is as well the action as the result of action to spread, or to transmit and propagate in a uniform way. It is thus expressed by all moves which, whatever their driving force, are trying to spread something in a system in an homogeneous way, thus tending to bring it from one equilibrium state to another equilibrium state when, under certain conditions, the system is saturated because its absorbing potential is exhausted. The notion of diffusion, considered from the action (...)

• Neolithisation
  25 January 2006, by C.G.

  The transition from an economy based on predation (hunting, gathering, fishing) to an economy based on the voluntary production of given plants and animals has been an essential process in the History of societies. In a limited number of places on Earth, some societies, confronted with particular constraints, achieved mastery in the reproduction of vegetal and animal species. This new relation to nature could then spread out from these places, either because of the expansion of these (...)

• Contingency
  18 October 2005, by F.D.-D.

  A philosophical notion that seems particularly useful for geographical reasoning. Lalande goes back to Aristotle for the general meaning of the term: "Est contingent tout ce qui est conçu comme pouvant être ou ne pas être à quelque égard et sous quelque réserve que ce soit [. . .] ( Si bien qu’) un événement futur est contingent si, toutes choses étant ce qu’elles sont, ce futur peut se produire ou ne pas se produire"1 . (The term is opposed in all its meanings to (...)

• Anthropization
  7 October 2005, by B. E.

  The idea of anthropization applies to any intervention by human societies that has an impact on natural elements. It generally concerns the action of man considered as an environmental agent. Whereas some limit the field covered by anthropization to the idea of degradation, others (P. Pinchemel) break down human intervention into appropriation, artificialization and development [the arrangement of space]: This ambivalence towards anthropic actions applies to the selection of cultivated (...)

• Process
  26 August 2004, by D. P.

  In geography, the notion of process integrates the idea of movement (from Latin pro-cedere: to go forward), of chain of actions or facts. Just as the idea of “dynamics", with which it is sometimes confused, a process makes part of a temporal approach of diachronic type.
  But in a process, the chain of facts is primarily of causal type and secondarily chronological. The succession of phenomena depends on an operative logic that allows integrating them into an interpretable framework. A (...)

• Epistemological bases
  31 August 2004, by D. P.

  Spatial analysis refers to one of the main uses of the term « space », common to geographers, to specialists of spatial economy or of regional science. Space is here a relative space, produced, defined by relations between places that develop because of interactions between localised social actors. This concept is distinct from the more encompassing concepts environment and territory or region. Space as making part of the explanatory project of spatial analysis is not assimilated with the (...)

• Causality
  6 October 2004, by C.G.

  Causality is an epistemological concept that formalises the very basis of any scientific approach, which consists in organising systematically empirical facts and giving them a sense. This constructivist definition of epistemology is opposed to the notion of causality conceived as a metaphysical postulate, according to which human Reason is able to grasp essence and raison d’être of things. Inside the scientific domain, causality is thus the link built between a cause (or a set of (...)

• Morphogenetic system
  25 January 2006, by G. H.

  A whole formed by the combination of different erosion agents present in a place and playing a role in the genesis of landforms.
  The first term was defined by A. Cholley in 1938 in lectures, and in 1950 in Morphologie structurale et morphologie climatique, Annales de Géographie, the second by J. Tricart in 1962. They mark the first appearance of truly systemic reasoning in geography. The emergence of these two very closely related concepts in geomorphologic thinking was the result of the (...)

• Models
  6 August 2004, by H. C.

  A model is a (provisional, of course) outcome in knowledge building. Facts of sensible world may well be registered, bases of assertions may well be translated in axiomatics, as long as knowledge will not be represented by a model that will support, let even say materialise, the view the researcher has built about its study object, this knowledge will remain incomplete, and clumsy.
  Attention must be paid to the multiple meanings the term "model" may take in common language; attention must (...)