Area polarised by a centre, for a set of relations (influence area of a city) or a category of relations (area of cultural or commercial influence, trading area). The notion of influence is difficult to specify. It is measured on basis of frequencies (or probabilities) of travels made by inhabitants of the periphery toward the […]
Area in which customers of a shop, of a commercial centre or of retail and services of a city are recruited.
Result of the concentration on a limited space of constructions, activities or population. « Population agglomérée » (agglomerated population) (France) : fraction of the population of a municipality living in groups of dwellings separated from each other by less than 200 meters and comprising at least 50 inhabitants (as opposite to « population dispersée » […]
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 […]
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 […]
The term neighbourhood is used for everything that is close, nearby, contiguous. Distance as measure of separation, of interval between two places may not be dissociated from the definition of a neighbourhood. The neighbourhood reaches its limit point (immediate neighbourhood) when the spatial units are contiguous, adjoining. A neighbourhood is always expressed into a metric […]
Spatiality combines all conditions and practices of individual and social life that are linked to relative position of individuals and groups with regard to one another. One fundamental postulate of geography is that those relative positions (or geographical situations) determine, probably or partly, form and intensity of social interactions. These in turn build back, while […]
A system is an autonomous entity with regard to its environment, organised in a stable structure (identifiable in the course of time), constituted by interdependent elements, whose interactions contribute in maintaining the system structure and making it evolve. The main epistemological contributions to the notion of system are : a circular conception of causality (retro-action […]
The term designates in the first place the position of an object on the earth surface by means of an explicit reference system, which is often the system of geographical coordinates. Those coordinates, essential for locating the object, represent the geometrical part of the G.I.S. It will sometimes be said that they are used to […]