Territory

Articles

• Oikumene
  29 September 2005, by J.-L. T.

  Oikos : residence, Oiken : to inhabit / inhabited, (implied gê) oikoumené : inhabited land
  Notion relative to the "meaning and object of human geography", quoting the title of the article of Paul Vidal de la Blache which opens the "Principes de géographie humaine". The object is the Earth, as the residence of the human species, while the meaning questions the interdependence relation between mankind and its habitat. The "oikumenal" perspective is unevenly explicit in human geography works. (...)

• Local development
  30 July 2012, by F.S.

  Local development is a process of diversification and enhancement of economic and social activity on local scale in a « territory», by way of the mobilisation and coordination of its material and immaterial resources. This notion refers at once to a stance adopted towards development issues, to a method for developing local territories, and to the analysis framework for assessing its functioning.
  The notion of local «development» appeared in France in the 1970s, at a time when certain (...)

• Ethnic Group
  27 July 2009, by F.D.-D.

  An ethnic group is a human group or type of human group, the members of which present common characteristics, these varying considerably from one author to another, but they are, generally speaking, sought among somatic characteristics, and increasingly among behaviours and cultural factors. Ethnic groups are also characterised by the fact that their size is between the small group, such as the family, and entities of large size such as nations.
  "Ethnic" is one of the many qualifiers for a (...)

• Terrain
  25 January 2006, by B. E.

  A French term, ‘terrain’ (terrain / ground / field) , used in social science and in natural science to designate elements of the lithosphere (e.g., ‘sedimentary terrains’) as well as the place, and by extension the subject,of research. For numerous researchers, ‘in the field’ activity represents one of the essential dimensions of their disciplinary method. In these disciplines, there has been a transfer from the lithologic, ‘terrestrial’, and (...)

• Continent
  11 January 2014, by B. E., G. H.

  The word continent is derived from the Latin terra continens – a continuous tract of land. The word has thus come to refer to a vast continuous surface area of the globe surrounded by oceanic masses. In a second approach, the word continent is used, in particular among island communities, to refer to what is more generally known as the mainland. In this case there is a «discontinuity» between islands and archipelagos some distance from the continental mass and the mainland, (...)

• Gender
  9 June 2012, by M. Bl.

  Gender, is commonly used in two fields of knowledge – gender in grammatical systems, or the male or female sex of individuals, where the OED adds "typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones". Indeed, in the social sciences, the word gender takes precedence over the word sex to refer to social relationships governed by the sex of individuals, or the social constructs of sexual differences. Substituting for the notions of sex and sexual (...)

• Rurality
  14 December 2013, by L. R.

  As a set of collective representations of the characteristics that make up a form of identity and functioning specific to rural areas, rurality belongs to the town-country dyad, with recent changes in perceptions, practices, and modes of governance in these spaces. Classically the term rurality (commoner in French than in English) refers to 1) the characteristic of being "rural", the characteristics of rural spaces; -2) "a set of values, a culture specific to the rural environment" or to (...)

• 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 (...)

• Earth
  22 December 2008, by B. E.

  For a single word in French and other Romance languages derived from the Latin "terra" (terre, etc), English has four, with a degree of overlap among meanings, both within English and with other languages such as French. "Earth", often with a capital letter, generally refers to the planet, but also to the soil in its non-technical aspects; it is also found in expressions like "down-to-earth". "Soil" refers mainly to the substrate used for agriculture, made up of matter that can be amended, (...)

• Agrarian system
  8 November 2013, by L. R.

  This concept identifies any form of agriculture as a “system” of interactions between the establishment and management of a cultivated ecosystem, the agrarian structures (land ownership patterns and landscapes) and the production system (combinations of arable and/or livestock production and the production means implemented in terms of techniques and practices).
  From agrarian structure to farming system
  The older of these two concepts is that of the agrarian structure, used (...)

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