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Geographical Modeling
Modeling Methodologies in Social Sciences Set
coordinated by
Roger Waldeck
Volume 2
Geographical Modeling
Cities and Territories
Edited by
Denise Pumain
First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as
permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced,
stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers,
or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the
CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the
undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

27-37 St George’s Road 111 River Street
London SW19 4EU Hoboken, NJ 07030
UK USA
www.iste.co.uk www.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2019

The rights of Denise Pumain to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949917
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-490-2
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Denise PUMAIN
Chapter 1. Complexity in Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Denise PUMAIN
1.1. A first bifurcation in the epistemology of
geographic modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1.1. “Vertical” explanations for the “science of places,
not people” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.1.2. “Horizontal” explanations for the science of the spatiality
of societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.1.3. The discussed status of modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.2. Modeled regularities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.2.1. Proximity and distances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.2.2. The scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.2.3. Concentration and accumulation: geographical inequalities
and scaling laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.2.4. Spatial change and trajectory dependence . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.2.5. Territorial drifts, space-time compression,
and globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1.3. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Chapter 2. Choosing Models to Explain the Dynamics of

Cities and Territories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Lena SANDERS
2.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
vi Geographical Modeling
2.2. Explaining by reasons or laws: choosing an

epistemological framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 32
2.3. The modeling approach: diversity of models . . . . . . . . . . .. 36
2.4. Explaining through statistical relationships or mechanisms . .. 38
2.5. Choosing the level of abstraction for the phenomenon to
be explained: general versus particular. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 41
2.6. Choosing the level of abstraction for the model: stylized
or realistic, KISS or KIDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 44
2.6.1. Modes of representation of space: from a stylized space
to a realistic space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 45
2.6.2. Formalizing spatial mechanisms: from stylized
to realistic. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 48
2.7. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 50
Chapter 3. Effects of Distance and Scale Dependence in

Geographical Models of Cities and Territories . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Cécile TANNIER
3.1. Three fundamental principles for modeling cities
and territories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.1.1. Effects of distance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.1.2. Effects of scale dependence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
3.2. Role of distance in spatial simulation models . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.3. Modeling scale dependence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
3.3.1. Scale dependence as a result of processes acting
at different scales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...... 77
3.3.2. Scale invariance for the description of
geographical phenomena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...... 83
3.3.3. Scale dependence as a generative mechanism for
simulated spatial configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...... 88
3.4. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...... 93
Chapter 4. Incremental Territorial Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Clémentine COTTINEAU, Paul CHAPRON, Marion LE TEXIER and
Sébastien REY-COYREHOURCQ
4.1. The map and the territory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
4.1.1. Modeling as one map: selection and schematization . . . . . 96
4.1.2. The representation of territory as an input of the model . . . 100
4.1.3. The representation of territory as an output of the model . . 102
4.2. Generality and specificity: explaining by ways of
geographical models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
4.2.1. Historical contingency and non-ergodicity . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Contents vii
4.2.2. General/specific/singular . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 109

4.3. Incremental territorial modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 110
4.3.1. Identifying the object, scale, configuration, and
stylized facts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 111
4.3.2. Gathering the different theoretical explanations . . . . . . .. 112
4.3.3. Hierarchizing the interaction processes between agents . .. 113
4.3.4. Hierarchizing the interaction processes between agents
and their environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
4.3.5. Implementing mechanisms and their formal alternatives . . 115
4.3.6. Combining, simulating, and comparing . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
4.4. Challenges and limits of multi-modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
4.4.1. The combinatorial curse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
4.4.2. Human and technical costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
4.4.3. Subjectivity in the choice of building blocks. . . . . . . . . . 119
4.4.4. Comparing models of different structures . . . . . . . . . . . 119
4.4.5. Sharing and accumulation of knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
4.5. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Chapter 5. Methods for Exploring Simulation Models . . . . . 125

Juste RAIMBAULT and Denise PUMAIN
5.1. Social sciences and experimentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
5.2. Geographical data and computer skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
5.3. New generation simulations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
5.3.1. A virtual laboratory: the OpenMOLE platform . . . . . . . . 131
5.3.2. The SimpopLocal experiment: simulation of an
emergence in geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..... 134
5.3.3. Implementation of SimpopLocal, from NetLogo to
OpenMOLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..... 137
5.3.4. Calibration and validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..... 139
5.4. Other examples of OpenMOLE applications:
network–territory interaction models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
5.5. Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
5.5.1. Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
5.5.2. Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
5.6. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Chapter 6. Model Visualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

Robin CURA
6.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
6.2. Visualization as modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
6.2.1. Visualization as a tool for interdisciplinarity . . . . . . . . . . 155
6.2.2. Visualization and reproducibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
viii Geographical Modeling
6.2.3. Visualizing a model means learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

6.3. Visualize to evaluate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
6.3.1. Visualize before modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
6.3.2. Visualize during the simulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
6.3.3. Visualizing after the simulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
6.4. Visualizing to compare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
6.4.1. Which models should be compared? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
6.4.2. How should visual comparison be done? . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
6.5. Visualizing to communicate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
6.5.1. Visualizing to disseminate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
6.6. Some obstacles inherent in model visualization . . . . . . . . . . 182
6.6.1. Producing and visualizing massive data . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
6.6.2. Visualization of aggregated data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
6.7. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
List of Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Introduction
Never has geography been so present in our societies. For centuries,

stimulated by the curiosity of travelers, the appetite of merchants, and the
greed of powers, knowledge about the planet, its resources, and the riches of
its cities and territories has never ceased to increase while remaining the
privilege of the powerful. Precise knowledge of the terrain was an essential
prerequisite for the great strategist Sun Tzu, in his famous book, The Art of
War, published in China’s warring kingdoms during the Spring and Fall
period in the 5th Century BCE. The French geographer Yves Lacoste
confirmed, as recently as 1976, the strategic capacities of the discipline by
showing in his provocatively-named book, La géographie, ça sert, d’abord,
à faire la guerre (Geography primarily serves to make war), that it was
supported in France by a nationalist and imperialist state power.
In France, geographic learning has been a requirement for all students in

school curricula since 1870. However, it is especially since the emergence of
mobile phones in the early 2000s that geography has been a factor in daily
life. Even in the poorest countries, a very large majority of people are able to
connect to the Internet, see images and maps from around the world, use
satellite positioning services, GPS, Galileo, Glonass, or Baidu, to mark
routes, navigate the world, geolocate, or make themselves visible to nearby
“services” and “friends”. This revolution surpasses, by the number of
applications it generates and the extent to which they are shared, the one that
has occurred more discreetly since the 1970s with the widespread use of
geographical information systems (GIS), in administrations, for spatial
planning, and in companies, for logistics management. The limited capacity
Introduction written by Denise PUMAIN.

x Geographical Modeling
of the computers of the time and the insufficient competence of the services
in the analysis and modeling of spatial data have long slowed down the
effective integration of these tools into many activities (Goodchild 2016).
One of the current challenges in fully exploiting the new major computer
capacities and democratizing geographical information is to make judicious
and appropriate use of the knowledge and skills accumulated about cities and
territories, not only through geography, but also by all disciplines that have
sooner or later integrated the “spatial turn” into their research approaches,
from agronomy to archeology and from history to epidemiology.
These disciplines share the construction of models, which are above all
summaries of knowledge, simplified in relation to the diversity and
complexity of individual cases, but communicable and improvable because
they are codified, at a given moment in the state of knowledge, by
mathematical or computer formalizations. The knowledge integrated into a
model represents sets of recurrent facts in empirical observations, which
have been selected according to the hierarchy of their effects on the problem
being studied, with more or less parsimony depending on whether we focus
on the generality or precision of the results. Calculation or simulation is used
to propose predictions, or to explore possible scenarios, as part of the model
assumptions. According to appropriate granularities and levels of resolution,
all forms of modeling can be used with extremely variable objectives:
laboratory hypothesis tests for theoretical models, serious games with a
didactic function, support models designed to solve difficult situations
including contradictory or even conflicting issues, models inserted in
interactive applications intended for information or decision support,
commonplace models generally used for location choices or infrastructure
templates, and so on.
Critics of models often denounce oversimplification, or selection bias,

and question the quality of the data used to validate them. Admittedly, each
model has its shortcomings and deficiencies, but the great advantage of
modeling, compared to the subtleties of written or spoken rhetoric, is that it
requires very detailed clarification of the assumptions of discourse and
intentions in order to better share them. Modelers are informed of the defects
and deficiencies of their models; they are the first to deplore them and are
constantly trying to overcome them.
The uses and functions of the models are multiple. They are often
designed for prediction (meteorological and financial models), more broadly
Introduction xi
data mining models, for the validation of an analytical theory (economic

models) or, in geography, for the planning and discussion of territorial issues
(decision support models and companion models), but social science
modeling develops practices that are much broader and richer than those
anchored in the traditional scientific imagination. Models are also used to
deepen and test explanations using an abductive approach (Besse 2000) that
interacts with conceptual constructions and empirical data, as will be shown
in several chapters of this book.
Several publications have already proposed more or less ambitious

syntheses of geographic modeling. For this expression in French, the Google
Scholar algorithm offers some 40,000 references, which are mainly journal
articles. Collective books or textbooks are less common. The book published
by Lena Sanders in 2001 is pioneering in this field. The work of Yves
Guermond (2005) compiles the productions and practices of the laboratory
of the University of Rouen. Others have focused on the important processes
of spatiotemporal change (Mathian and Sanders 2014) or only deal with
certain urban models (Antoni et al. 2011; Bonhomme et al. 2017). Most
recently, two books by Arnaud Banos (2013, 2016) and one by Frank
Varenne (2017) laid the foundations for epistemological and philosophical
reflection on geographical models.
The book we propose here is part of a multidisciplinary collection. It is

designed to provide didactic information on the modeling process, in its
particularities justified by the handling of geographical concepts and
information, and illustrated with examples representative of the major
innovations that have taken place over the past decade. Chapter 1 recalls the
foundations of the geographical discipline on which models can be based to
take into account the complexity in the organization and evolution of cities
and territories. Chapter 2 deciphers the crucial choices for modeling, which
are at the root of the diversity of models and their uses: we examine to what
extent the complex can be simplified or, on the contrary, how can we try to
integrate it into the models. Chapter 3 describes the models that establish
explicit relationships between contrasting spatial morphologies, which
present inequalities on different scales, and the social processes that generate
them, according to “micro–macro” dynamics. Chapter 4 explores the
construction stage of city and territory models and proposes a new
incremental multi-modeling method. Chapter 5 introduces various possible
uses of a simulation platform, OpenMOLE, which uses evolutionary
algorithms and provides access to HPC equipment. Finally, Chapter 6 is
xii Geographical Modeling
devoted to the new visualization tools that are so important for model
exploration and validation, as well as for communicating their results.
At the end of the book, the index brings together the main concepts that
characterize geographical modeling. For the concepts that are already
precisely defined in the chapters devoted to them, the multiple page numbers
that testify to their appearance throughout the book make it possible to
understand how they also apply to widely shared intellectual and practitioner
approaches. Moreover, essential concepts such as “space”, “simulation”,
“territory”, “city”, and “visualization” do not appear in the index because
they are used and enriched many times by all of the authors. It is also
because of the great coherence of these texts that the bibliographical
references, which often appear several times, are grouped into one list at the
end. This provides an original and updated state of the art on the major
parallel and convergent directions in geographical modeling.
1
Complexity in Geography
The last three or four decades have completely renewed the modeling
practices of geographers. Two major changes, one epistemological and the
other technical, are at the origin of these transformations. Technological
change is the tremendous expansion of information processing capabilities,
which has made work that could previously only be sketched as thought
experiments possible, or work that has been carried out wholly incompletely
due to a lack of powerful computing resources. This technical change has
made it possible since about the 2000s to fully implement a major
epistemological change that occurred sometime earlier in the 1970s and
1980s. This is the introduction of paradigms and models from the natural
sciences into geography, whose keywords are self-organization (the
dissipative structures of Prigogine and Nicolis (1971)), synergetics (Haken
1977; Weidlich 2006), and complexity and the notion of emergence
(Bourgine et al. 2008). We will not recall here those filiations that are
already mentioned in several works (e.g. Dauphiné 2003; Pumain et al.
1989; Sanders 1992). We want to show not so much how these forms of
modeling can be applied in geography, but how to proceed for real model
transfers, since many theories of the discipline had already largely
anticipated the need for the newly proposed formalizations.
Transferring scientific language, concepts, methods, and instruments

from one discipline to another is only a fruitful operation if it meets an
expectation, a real need for innovation. In this case, it is not so much the
paradigm of complexity as such that has been the novelty for the human and
social sciences since they have always been confronted with the
Chapter written by Denise PUMAIN.
Geographical Modeling: Cities and Territories,

First Edition. Edited by Denise Pumain.
© ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
2 Geographical Modeling
irreversibility of the trajectories of their objects, the near impossibility of

prediction, and the phenomena of emergence in the systems studied. It is
because complexity sciences provide complementary methods, means to
process information and to formalize knowledge. Many geographers have
adopted these references to work on their models. These have contributed to
building cumulative knowledge when previously acquired intuitions could
benefit from the transfer. This is why it seemed useful in this introductory
chapter to remind geographers as well as readers trained in other sciences of
the disciplinary fundamentals on which geography modeling can be based,
particularly to deal with the complex objects that are cities and territories.
We quickly retrace the successive postures of geographers faced with the
possibilities of modeling, and then, we outline a set of regularities that can
be more easily modeled among the objects that geography studies. These
regularities partly lead to specific modeling practices by geographers, which
are largely motivated by the multiplicity of observation scales, but also
practices that have been much more in demand over the past two decades by
the influx of geolocalized data, which opens up considerable development
opportunities.
The general idea is that the complexity of the objects and processes
observed by geographers is always constructed, not so much in formulating
universal “laws”, but more often by including spatiotemporal elements, like
in other human and social sciences, which are fundamentally “historical
sciences” (Passeron 1991). These disciplines share with the natural sciences
certain forms of nonlinear relationships, processes of self-organization,
morphogenesis, dynamics oriented by attractors, or emergence phenomena
characteristic of complex systems, which are formalizable on specific case
subsets or segments of their trajectory. Geography adds to this complexity of
nonlinear processes the specific feature of being interested in a very wide
diversity of variables and levels of observation, including natural and social
elements, in an attempt to formalize the evolution of landscapes, cities, and
territories, which gives an additional dimension to the complexity of the
systems that geography models1.
1 A few other disciplines such as archeology or social and environmental epidemiology also
deal with indicators relating to the natural sciences as well as the humanities and social
sciences.
Complexity in Geography 3
1.1. A first bifurcation in the epistemology of geographic

modeling
Geography appears among the humanities and social sciences as one of

the most practiced in modeling (Banos 2013; Sanders 2001). Geography has
often been identified as a pioneer in the use of digital tools. It is no
coincidence that a philosopher has chosen to test his conceptions of
modeling with this discipline (Varenne 2018).
This is a paradox: indeed, until recently, geography seemed to be a “soft

science”, insofar as it does not assert theories as powerfully unitary as the
so-called mainstream economy, and does not export its concepts as much as
sociology, if we think, for example, of the French theory in vogue in the
United States for at least 30 years. However, the theoretical and quantitative
“revolution” that began in the 1950s in Sweden and the United States and
then developed in France in the 1970s (Cuyala 2014; Pumain and Robic
2002), probably explains, to a large extent, why a certain “spatial turn” took
place in most human and social sciences in the 1990s. Concepts and
methods, software tools such as geographic information systems (GIS), and
research questions brought by geographic space modeling practices (Banos
2016; Bonhomme et al. 2017) have been successfully imported into almost
all disciplines.
However, in everyday language as in many representations of common

sense, the “geography” or description of the Earth sometimes seems to be
summed up in terms of nomenclatures, knowledge of locations (latitude,
longitude, and altitude), and place names, the toponyms that societies have
associated with them, whether they are mountain ranges, rivers, islands, or
cities. However, academic geographic science – once the era of exploratory
journeys and the “discoveries” of the regions of indigenous peoples by
colonizers had passed – relied in the late 19th Century on questions designed
to unpack the reasons for the diversity of the imprints shaped by societies on
the Earth’s surface. Agrarian landscapes and forms of habitats, the
exploitation of mining resources and industrial production, arrangements of
villages and cities, traffic routes, and tangible or intangible flows have been
examined at all scales, in a diverse range of geographical environments and
according to their evolution over the course of history. Two main types of
explanation successively dominated the research. In the first half of the 20th
Century, the main focus was on the relationship between a society and its
environment, speculating on the more or less favorable or constraining
nature of natural conditions and the social capacity to develop them,
according to a somewhat “vertical” interpretation of its relationship with the

resources offered locally by the planet. In the second half of the 20th
Century, another, more “horizontal” way of producing explanations
emerged, which tends to interpret the characteristics of a territory or a city
from its situation in the world, i.e. from its relations with other territories and
other cities. In truth, these two explanatory forms, which lead to very
different models, are complementary and are necessarily articulated in any
geographical interpretation of a particular city or territory.
1.1.1. “Vertical” explanations for the “science of places, not

people” 2
In its academic history, geography has long been at the interface between
the natural and human sciences. Taking into account the description of the
planet (Robic et al. 2006) and its transformation into environments and
landscapes by societies (Robic 1992), it had built a few general models. The
relationship between the material organization of societies and natural
resources, mediated by climatic and altitudinal zones, had been well observed
and described, revealing some regularities. In particular, they highlighted the
fairly close interdependence between ancient societies and the local character
of mineral and plant resources used in housing and agriculture, which did not,
however, exclude long-distance trade in less common commodities. When
such regularities were systematized to excess (e.g. “limestone votes left,
granite votes right” to caricature the positions of André Siegfried, founding
geographer of electoral sociology in the 1930s, who actually linked the
hydrography of these environments to their form of habitat, grouped, or
dispersed and to the degree of dependence of the inhabitants on the
domination of landowners), the corresponding statements were quickly
rejected on the grounds of “determinism”. Conversely, noting the great
diversity of selections and combinations of resources made by societies under
more or less equivalent physical conditions could also, on the contrary, lead
to “exceptionalism” (Schaefer 1953). This expression covers Schaefer’s
criticism, both of the claims, which was frequent at the time, of a specificity
of the geographical explanation, based on the genetics of the places, and of its
consequence consisting in highlighting the uniqueness of the places. Regional
2 The expression in quotation marks is by Vidal de la Blache, with the intention of

characterizing the geography project to distinguish it from that of Durkheimian sociology,
which became institutionalized at the same time, between the end of the 19th Century and the
beginning of the 20th Century.
idiosyncrasies have been the subject of numerous demonstrations denying the

possibility of a rise in generality, the authors insisting sometimes on the
strong constraint exerted by local resources and sometimes on the social free
will with regard to how using and transforming them, as well as to the
diversity of their creations in terms of the forms of their political, social, and
cultural organizations. In the early days of academic geography, it was,
therefore, physical geography in the fields of geomorphology or climate,
which allowed modeling. Thus, since the early 1960s, the English geographer
Richard Chorley (1962) advocated the transposition of von Bertalanffy’s
general theory of systems into geomorphology and advocated the design of
open systems, both for physical and human geography3. In such systems, the
second law of thermodynamics does not apply and evolutions are not directed
toward the maximum entropy and homogeneity, but other processes generate
all kinds of configurations, formalized in models, which were listed five years
later in a book written with Peter Haggett about these two branches of
geography (Chorley and Haggett 1967).
1.1.2. “Horizontal” explanations for the science of the spatiality

of societies
Some other types of regularities had indeed been observed since at least
the early 19th Century in the organization of cities and territories and gave
rise to various attempts at formalization, through mathematical models or
iconic representations. The regularities of the spacing of cities, the hierarchy
of their functions, and the interlocking of their catchment areas had been
described since 1841 by the Saint-Simonian Jean Reynaud as “the general
system of cities” strongly constrained by the use of the nearest service and
thus generating forms of circular or hexagonal service areas, interlocking
according to a hierarchy of rarity of urban services (Reynaud 1841; Robic
1982). This concept and the derived spatial models had little immediate
impact, but the principles of a theory associating the size of cities with the
rarity of their economic functions and the extent of their clientele in the
surrounding region were rediscovered and systematized by the German
geographer Walter Christaller (1933) in a “central place theory”, which was
the subject of multiple tests in all parts of the world (Berry and Pred 1961).
3 “Open-system thinking, however, directs attention to the heterogeneity of spatial

organization, to the creation of segregation, and to the increasingly hierarchical differentiation
which often takes place with time. These latter features are, after all, hallmarks of social, as
well as biological, evolution” (p. 10).
This theory actually included the previous model known as the “Reilly law
of retail gravitation” (Reilly 1931), which explained the location of
commercial activities by competition between businesses and services
frequented by consumers under the constraint of proximity. In both the
Reilly and Christaller models, travel costs are borne by the consumer and are
added to the price of goods, encouraging people to buy from the nearest
place. This determines, in the cartographic representations, more or less
circular-shaped catchment areas, which fit together in the form of hexagons
in the spatial diagrams drawn by Christaller.
In fact, these early geographic models validate what American

cartographic geographer Waldo Tobler (1970) later referred to as “the first
law of geography” (“everything interacts with everything, but two close
things are more likely to interact than two distant things”). This law
summarizes many of the previous observations made about the movement of
people in space. The first formalizations can be attributed to the geographer
Ernst Georg Ravenstein (1885), who published several articles from 1885
onward which summarized the main characteristics of population
movements in a period of high rural exodus under the title “Migration laws”
in a British statistical journal.
It was the American geographer Edward Ullmann who, in 1954, proposed

defining geography as the science of spatial interactions. In his work
Geography as Spatial Interaction, he certainly introduces the same
“physical” model as the astrophysicist Stewart (1948), namely, a
“gravitation” model (the flows between two geographical units are
proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the
distance that separates them) but he truly transposes this idea to the social
sciences. He specifies the geographical conditions that are likely to explain
the exchange and the movement: there must be a complementarity between a
demand for a given product from a certain place of origin and the resources
available in a place of supply, and travel must be possible, and therefore not
too costly, for the exchange to take place. The characteristic principle that
organizes geographical space is, therefore, the constraint of proximity; it
includes the “sociological” principle that puts it into practice, stipulating that
the nearest destination is chosen. There must also be no closer places
offering the same product, or intermediate locations, which the sociologist
Stouffer (1940) calls intervening opportunities.
The geography that is built on these foundations (Abler et al. 1977) is

then conceived as a science of the organization of space. This expression
was coined by the French geographer Jean Gottman (1961) about the
Northeast megalopolis, the group of cities that stretches from Boston to
Washington. Although it is made up of distinct urban entities, whose urban
structure is not continuous, this large regional complex appears to be a
functional unit due to the multiplicity of communication and exchange
networks that connect these cities together and make them complementary in
a differentiated territory. The concept of a region then gradually emerged
from the criteria of landscape homogeneity or historical delimitation that had
hitherto underpinned it and was enriched by the concept of a functional
region, defined by the polarization of traffic flows and the strong economic
and social interdependencies between the cities and countryside that
constitute it. This new form taken by geographical investigation then makes
it possible, under the designation of “locational analysis” (Haggett 1965), to
identify all kinds of regularities in geographical space and to build canonical
models, whose ancestors are often shared by economists specializing in the
emerging “regional science” (Isard 1960).
The translation into French of Peter Haggett’s book (Locational Analysis

in Human Geography) by Hubert Fréchou in 1973 converted the title to
“spatial analysis”. This expression, which was used in subsequent manuals
(e.g. Pumain and Saint-Julien 1997), is the subject of one of the three main
entries in the online encyclopedia Hypergeo, entitled “the spatiality of
societies”, alongside the entries “societies and environment” and “cities,
regions, and territories”. The notion of spatial analysis in French covers a
perspective centered on human geography and a broader and less strictly
technical theoretical content than in the practices of British or North
American geographers. For example, British geographers Paul Longley and
Michael Batty closely associate the spatial analysis with specialized GIS
software in their 1996 and 2003 books, and the preface to their 2003 book
defines it as “a kind of data mining technology”. More broadly, the
definitions given by French-speaking geographers for spatial analysis readily
incorporate the statements of theories and models, and some specialists in
“social geography” have sometimes also claimed this expression as a means
of designating their activity.
1.1.3. The discussed status of modeling
Since the 1970s, attempts at modeling in geography have been subject to

heavy criticism. To mention just one example, let us recall one of the most
eminent geographers of his generation, Pierre George, a member of the
Institute, who denounced both a “scientific adventurism”, “quantitative

illusion”, and a “new determinism” (1972). For this Marxist geographer,
criticism focuses above all on the idea that quantified formalizations can
only use biased data, as they depend on the policies that build them. More
surprisingly, by placing himself in the field of philosophy, Pierre George
also denounces a “much more serious mystification” brought by the
“formalization applied to geographical data”. According to him, it
“presupposes, indeed, the acceptance of the idea that men and their
initiatives are integrated into concentration camp categories from which they
can only escape by a statistically negligible, politically and socially
reprehensible marginalism, the marginalism of the anomaly, compared to an
institutionalized system and disseminated by all modern means of imposing
information and official culture” (1976, p. 54). Many other authors have
denounced the models as too general and simplistic. The use of
mathematical models, often quite simple, was denounced as unsuitable for
accurately representing individual and social processes, e.g. in terms of
location or displacement choices. The main argument against any modeling
was the respect for human freedom, which was not to be represented as
“obeying” the constraints of distance or natural conditions. The modeling
was also denounced for political reasons such as an attempt to “naturalize”
social processes, which would have been tantamount to accepting the
established order and would not have allowed it to be called into question.
This tension is also well expressed by the Anglo-American geographer
David Harvey, who accepts Popperian models and logic in a first book on
explanation in geography (Harvey 1969), then in a second book on the
relations of domination in the urban space (Harvey 1973), and finally
proposes a Marxian critique of capitalism and imperialism (Harvey 1982) –
without, however, going so far as to accept post-modern criticism or to deny
modeling.
The dissociation between Marxist interpretations and the use of

quantitative models has often been more pronounced in English-speaking
countries4 than in continental Europe, where the “theoretical and quantitative
revolution” was more opposed to conservative geographers, both politically
4 There are exceptions, including the work of William Bunge, who in 1962 proposed a
“Theoretical Geography” based on axioms and which was rather geometrical, and who also
analyzed social inequalities in the suburbs of Chicago with quantified indices (Fitzgerald:
Geography of a Revolution, Schenkman Publishing Cy, Cambridge, 1971, p. 1071) where he
denounced the capture of land rents by the richest and the poor living conditions imposed on
black people.
and methodologically. The successive waves of radical geography,

phenomenology, and then post-modern geography that have emerged in the
United States since the 1980s have spread to Europe with unequal intensities
while making many criticisms of modeling (under the pretexts of
“fetishization of space”, voluntarily forgetting actors, conflicts, social, or
colonial, then forgetting representations, sensations, or, even more recently,
emotions). An integrative definition of spatial analysis as “the formalized
study of the configuration and properties of space produced and experienced
by human societies” (Pumain and Saint-Julien 1997) proposed in a handbook
signified a willingness to calm these controversies, which have aroused
animated debate among all social sciences. In the 1990s and the decades that
followed, there was a very large development of models, a widening of their
practical uses, and a progressive enrichment of their content, largely
supported by the generalization of geographical information systems and the
integration of geolocation into all kinds of technical devices (see Chapter 6).
Finally, the dizzying increase in computing capacity was expected to free up
modeling from some of the qualitative limitations that could hinder the
consideration of hazards and individual specificities in models (see
Chapters 3–5).
According to our constructive perspective for modeling, proposals

contrary to modeling, which are still used in some publications today, are
based on misunderstandings that are deliberately not well clarified. They are
likely to maintain controversies, not very valuable for the image of
geography, and can be classified under three main types: those that reject
any kind of regularity in the organization of the space of societies and deny
the usefulness of a geographical discipline; those that treat geographical
space as an inert container of physical objects and social relationships; and
those that place any explanation within the exclusive framework of a theory
of mono-disciplinary inspiration, such as certain geo-economic models or
even certain narratives of post-modern inspiration or certain militant texts.
However, we believe that geographical modeling can integrate a very wide
variety of social processes, both individual and collective, and can be based
on knowledge established by several disciplines, at different levels of
resolution and granularity of its objects, from the individual to the world.
Like a more discursive geography, strengthening existing powers is not the
primary function of modeling; it can also be used to promote sustainable
development and help the poorest populations and territories.
1.2. Modeled regularities
With their theories of complex systems, physicists who enter the social
sciences to propose models are often tempted to project some of the
constraints they have built to analyze the forces at work in the physical
world. Although energy, in the various forms of solar radiation, gravity or
animal, human, and mechanical work, is always taken into account in
technical artifacts or human organizations, it is not very effective to consider
that this is the main constraint (or last resort) that would govern the
construction of human activity on the Earth’s surface and from which the
form of the socio-spatial organizations studied in geography would have
been identified (West 2017). The configurations of cities and territories that
can be modeled by geographers are built by accumulated human work,
carried out under material constraints, but also with some well-identified
anthropological and social determinants, e.g. the relatively universal
principle of the “law of least effort” as enunciated by G. K. Zipf (1949), or
the frequent effects of political, cultural, or economic domination were
observed in social relations and interactions.
The history, the forms of political and economic organization of societies,

and their cultural creations are always part of the explanations proposed in
“general geography” or in local or regional monographs. However,
geography itself provides a modelable dimension to these constructions, to
which the other disciplines of the natural and social sciences are articulated
as in any explanation of complex social systems. Modeling takes into
account major regularities, which are accepted, often implicitly, by most
geographers. These regularities include the constraint of proximity, which
brings into play various expressions of distance in all gradient models of the
center-periphery type, or the organization of geographical space in levels,
leading to great attention being paid to the scale of structures and processes
or the reduction of interactions by territorial boundaries or barriers (physical
or socio-cultural) that create discontinuities. Models of spatial change
integrate the other regularity of temporal persistence of geographical
objects, which is certainly shorter than those of geological periods or
ecosystems, but so much longer than that of daily movements or human lives
or even sometimes than the passage of generations, which leads to many
reflections on the resilience of cities and territories and justifies their
modeling.
These major regularities of spatial organization and evolution of space

and geographical objects are presented in the following, which necessarily
introduces some repetitions, as the processes that generate them are complex
according to the meaning of this term in the social sciences. These processes
are difficult to separate from each other because they often interfere together
during the genesis of cities and territories.
1.2.1. Proximity and distances
The concept of distance encompasses a range of indicators and measures

of separation, adapted to the different types of relationships considered to
signify distance, spacing, or remoteness, which have greatly broadened the
scope of the concept of distance in the geographical explanation. To
conceive a distance is indeed to give oneself a relational representation of
space, whose properties then depend on the nature of the chosen distance
and, therefore, on the form of the possible relations (offered or revealed)
between the parts of space. To do this, we must no longer see space as a
simple container, an empty room furnished by human activities, but as a
construction, a representation of the relationships (virtual or realized)
between different places, variable according to the traffic facilities, or the
intensity of the exchanges that we consider. Broadly speaking, two
complementary insights are used to define distance as a structuring factor of
geographical space, in this relational and also “relativistic” conception of the
distance between places.
The notion of geographical location (situation géographique in French)

belongs to “classical” geography, appearing very early in the history of the
discipline as a major way of explaining inequalities in the concentration of
populations, wealth, or certain activities. It defines, to a certain extent, the
added value of a location by its position, relative to other locations, therefore
by its greater or lesser distance from other locations. The situational
advantage is often a better accessibility, i.e. a shorter distance from a number
of other places where wealth is produced or circulates. Geographical location
is advantageous when the topography improves the accessibility of the place
by reducing its access distances: this is how the development of cities
located at the crossroads of large valleys or at the maritime outlet of a major
land route, such as that of estuary cities, was explained in the 19th Century.
Geographical location is also considered more favorable when traffic
conditions are easy, relatively reducing distances, e.g. in lowland areas as
opposed to mountainous regions. The so-called “contact” situation is the one
that makes additional resources close to the sites. The time and cost savings
associated with distance travel, when they persist long enough, thus become
important components in explaining concentrations and accumulations of

population and activities in the territories.
Distance is a decisive factor in many location models, which represent

the effects of “location rents”, which complement those of fertility rents or
resource sites. Weber’s optimal industrial location model, developed around
1900, combines distances to sites (raw materials, markets, and labor) to
estimate the best possible position for a production plant, minimizing
transport costs; the von Thünen agricultural specialization zone model,
developed in 1826, uses distance to the urban market and the differential
rent it generates as the main explanation for land-use choices.
Some effects of distance are so systematic that they result in repeated

configurations, which arise in the spatial organization of most societies at
different times, and which are broadly identified as “center-periphery
structures”. These are forms of geographical space without precise but
highly organized boundaries, a bit like a magnetic field, with a gradient of
decreasing intensity as a function of the distance around a pole. The
measurement of the relationship between places that define these spaces in
the form of fields is then a flow, a quantity of exchanges, a frequency or
intensity of relationships (number of commuters between places of residence
and work, number of customers between a service provision center and the
places surrounding it, number of telephone calls, origins of migrants and
goods or investments attracted by a center). These configurations could
admittedly be explained as society taking into account the laws of physics
because it is a question of saving energy, thus minimizing an expense that
then weighs as a constraint on the dynamics of social activities in space. By
playing on the similarity between physical and anthropological expressions,
the statistician G. K. Zipf (1949) also proposed calling this universal
propensity to cut as short as possible and to go as close as possible, “the law
of the least effort”, which amounts to organizing activities and movements
according to distance.
However, the origin of these almost geometric configurations, generally

circular, can also be found elsewhere. Distance explains the shape they take:
it does not explain why and how they are formed. The geographical space
produced by the societies is oriented (anisotropic). Some places, selected as
centers, acquire a social, symbolic, and economic value, which makes them
centers where flows of people, energy, materials, and information from the
periphery converge. More often than not, this attraction is explained by the
fact that the center exercises domination, which may be political, military,
religious, commercial, administrative, or symbolic (emotional and

cognitive), over its periphery in various ways, which results in an unequal
exchange, an asymmetry in the balance of interactions between the center
and periphery to the benefit of the center. This process tends to reinforce the
accumulation of supply in the center, which also increases the degree of
complexity of its activities. The center redistributes some of the amenities,
central functions, or innovations toward the periphery, but without totally
reducing inequalities. However, maintaining the attractiveness of the center
presupposes that it improves its accessibility and attractiveness for its
periphery over time, according to a positive feedback loop between
centrality and accessibility (Bretagnolle 1999). The value of geographical
locations is not immutable over time.
It is, therefore, not the physical analogy5 but rather the relevance of its
mathematical formula to summarize the form taken by observations of
spatial interactions that made the success of the gravitational principle to
describe space organizations very strongly structured by distance from a
center. The potential models, or the so-called “Reilly’s law” model
(presented in section 1.1.2), indicate that the attraction force is proportional
to the mass of the center and inversely proportional to the distance between
it and the other places considered. It is used to delimit market areas, around
shopping centers, or zones of influence around urban centers. Geomarketing
techniques have a large intake of gravity models, in which factors of
attraction, as well as distance measurements, are obviously modulated
according to the cases analyzed.
The spatial interaction model derived from the gravitational principle,

which represents the volume of exchanges between two places as being
proportional to the product of the masses present and inversely proportional
to the distance between them, is also universally used to summarize, analyze,
or predict the geography of flows, whether they are transport- or migration-
related. Migratory fields (studied since 1970 in France by Daniel Courgeau),
as well as urban fields (analyzed on a European scale by Marianne Guérois
(2003)), are described by decreasing power or exponential functions of
distance, which demonstrate its prevalence and universality in the social and
geographical construction of interactions.
5 The physicist and geographer Alan Wilson, who considerably improved the estimation
technique of the spatial interaction model, interpreted it in terms of “entropy maximization”
and then linked it to the statistical theory of information.
Whether the centers are spread out as stages on a route or tend to cover a
territory according to a grid, they emerge at a distance characteristic of other
centers, called spacing. Spacing is on average twice the range, i.e. the
maximum length of travel by customers to obtain the service in question.
The regularity of spacing is explained by the amount of population or
activities that the centers serve, not simply by physical distance. The average
spacing between centers increases with their level of complexity. The result
is a hierarchical organization of the spatial structure of the centers, which is
clearly demonstrated in the models of Walter Christaller’s central places
theory, for example. The differentiation of space into centers and peripheries
can be seen at different geographical scales. The multi-scale organization
characteristic of the exercise of centrality and polarization encourages us to
explore the fractal nature of the evolutionary processes that generate the
hierarchical configurations of central places and their peripheries (see
Chapter 3). The centers compete for the resources on their periphery and
develop innovations during this interactive process. The development of
innovations depends on the action of the actors located in the center. This
consists either in a creation, anticipation, and attempt to exploit a profit, or in
an imitation of an innovation that has succeeded elsewhere, and these two
attitudes constitute an adaptation strategy. The innovations thus imposed or
imitated are disseminated among the centers, by proximity or hierarchical
dissemination (see sections 1.2.2–1.2.4). A center only acquires a higher
level of centrality by accumulating and complexifying its activities if it
succeeds in competing with other centers by capturing the initial advantage
of a sufficient number of innovations. It is because this process has been
carried out under the constraint of distance, wherever interactions have
occurred over a fairly long period of time in contiguity, according to the
proximity rule, that so many regularities have been introduced into the
spacing of urban centers, at least in the very ancient regions of the world.
Proximity explains why interdependencies are often detected in

“statistical landscapes”, representing the values of all kinds of indicators
through maps. These interdependencies are measured by autocorrelation
indices of spatialized variables in a given neighborhood (Anselin 1995; Cliff
and Ord 1973). Autocorrelation is positive when the effects of spatial
diffusion have produced similarities as a function of proximity; it is negative
when territorial competition has selected locations that have benefited over
the long term from asymmetries in territorial exchanges. These correlations
have long been thought of as troublesome in the application of statistical
regression models (often referred to as “econometric models”) to
geographical data, but geographers have developed spatialized regression
models that, on the contrary, allow the analysis of the heterogeneity of

variable associations in the geographical space to be specified and
strengthened (Brundson et al. 1996).
Finally, in the era of globalization, which is manifested in particular by

the deployment of multinational companies opening subsidiaries in all parts
of the world, or by the trend toward the universal use of global
communication tools such as the Internet, the so-called “social” networks or
smartphones, one could imagine that “the Earth is flat” and that distance
would no longer be a major constraint in the organization of geographical
space. Yet, it should be noted that proximity continues to play an important
role in the creation of new international institutions, whether political, such
as the European Union, or economic in nature, such as trade agreement areas
negotiated between countries around the world, such as ASEAN, NAFTA, or
Mercosur (Mareï and Richard 2018).
1.2.2. The scale
Geographers have a constrained vocabulary when they produce a

discourse on scales. They are major map producers and consumers whose
scale is the measurement of the ratio between a distance measured on the
map and the distance in the field. They therefore spontaneously speak of
(cartographic) large scale for cadastres or urban plans at 1/10,000e for
example, of medium scale for a road map at 1/200,000e, and of small scale
for a representation of the world at 1/1,000,000e. However, the common
language, and often that of decision makers, is that regional planning or
global problems are on a “large scale” compared to the local scale, which
concerns smaller areas. It is, therefore, better to find other adjectives to avoid
these unfortunate ambiguities. Scale is thus associated with the orders of
magnitude of geographical objects, which can be measured, for example, in
terms of area, population, or wealth. Scale is called “resolution” when it
indicates a degree of precision in cartographic representations or satellite
images or even qualitative descriptions, which include more or less detail or
generalization depending on whether one is at a large, medium, or small
geographical scale. Increasingly, geographical information is presented with
reference to the coordinates of the Earth’s surface in a form known as
“geolocalized”, which makes it possible to form analytical filters by
aggregation in grids (or rasters) of different dimensions that more or less
smooth out the heterogeneities in the geographical space. Discourses
produced from information thus aggregated at different scales can vary
significantly, according to the principle of the MAUP (Modifiable Areal

Unit Problem), well studied by Stan Openshaw (1983a).
This also does not prevent us from considering that scale in geography
represents a conception of the organization of space in more or less distinct
levels of organization, which differ not only in their dimensions but also in
the emerging properties that characterize them, due to the complexity of the
spatial interactions that generate them. These spatial organizations can be
“spontaneous”, self-organized, for example, in the case of cities or diaspora
networks of linguistic or cultural groups, and they can also be led by
institutions, for example in the case of political or administrative territories
or economic regions or contractual networks. These levels, which are easily
identifiable in the geographical space, are taken into account by the models.
A very good example of “spontaneous” organization in levels is given by

the distinction that geographers make between the city, the level of the
organization of daily life, and urban networks or systems of cities, which
regulate longer-range exchange networks in regional and national, even
continental or global territories. At the city level, several types of regularities
can be noted as “stylized facts”, characterizing the organization of urban
space, regardless of periods and political regimes or forms of economic
relations. Spatial interactions are intense because residents visit an average
of three to four different places per person per day. These interactions have
always been constrained by the length of the 24-h day, which has not
changed over the course of history. The total daily time spent on these trips
averages 1 h (i.e. distances of 3–4 km whilst walking and 30–40 km in
motorized cities). Traveling is done at relatively slow speeds (from 4 to –25
km/h). The high densities of cities and the difficulties of organizing traffic
explain why a large number of models have been built for urban transport.
The geography of urban flows has thus been modeled by gravity models,
derived from statistical mechanics, information theory or fluid dynamics,
and percolation, before more sophisticated models integrate more social
processes into them (see Chapters 2 and 3).
However, it is not these interactions of everyday life which really

produce urban forms, with their emerging properties characteristic of the
spatial organization of centrality, contrary to what a simplistic application of
complexity theories might suggest. Even if the demand for transport over
time produces a tension for the construction of new networks, the emergence
of urban forms results from determinations of another kind, both in terms of
time and space scales and in terms of social processes. Indeed, the forms of
cities are generated over much longer periods of time than in everyday life
(from a few decades to a few centuries), by processes that are often
incremental, more rarely organized as large-scale urban planning schemes, in
the construction of buildings and transport infrastructure. The main
constraint here is that of the social value attributed to more or less central
locations, which is expressed by competition for space and the demand for
accessibility, and therefore by more or less strong inequalities in the capacity
of occupation by activities and populations that are endowed with different
degrees of power and wealth. It is these processes of competition and social
distinction in geographical space, which lead to often highly structured
configurations of urban space, generally arranged according to a decreasing
gradient of prices and densities from the center to the periphery of cities
(according to a configuration called urban field, which can be mono or
polycentric). This constraint on urban forms due to the unequal social value
of space also explains other emerging forms of spatial distribution, according
to fractal geometries of buildings, the street network, open spaces or
different urban services, and highly variable forms, more or less marked but
still present, of the spatial separation of social categories of populations or
zoning of activities.
At the level of systems of cities, other emerging properties characterize the

organization of well-connected cities over the long term within the same
territorial unit: the urban hierarchy expresses the very large inequality in
city sizes, in terms of population concentrations (from a few thousand to a
few tens of millions of inhabitants in the largest territories such as China or
India today) or the number of urban activities and the value of their
production. Functional diversity reflects the presence in the same region of
cities with different and complementary functions that result from a
geographically differentiated process of economic and social specialization.
The interactions that make it possible to define a set of cities organized in a
system are carried out with lower frequencies than those that take place in a
city on a daily basis. With a lot of variation, it is estimated that about a day’s
travel is possible for interactions to be strong enough to lead to
interdependence in the demographic and socio-economic evolution of cities.
Of course, national, linguistic, or cultural boundaries are involved in these
very approximate boundaries; they can slow down or reduce interactions
without, nonetheless, ever completely nullifying them. An important feature
of these interurban interactions is that they now operate at much higher
speeds (a few hundred km/h) than those of internal city interactions (between
20 and 30 km/h). Rapid transport, rail, then air and high-speed trains have,
over the past two centuries, brought cities much closer together than other
parts of the territories.
However, here again, it is not these incremental interactions, represented

by the physical movement of people, the exchange of goods, or even the
very rapid exchange of information between cities, that explain the
formation of urban hierarchies. The explanation lies at another temporal
level, through the accumulation of these slightly asymmetric or partly
qualitatively different incremental changes, which we summarize as the
social processes of innovation creation and adoption. These particular
modalities of urban growth and transformation through innovation are both
what results and what generates them. Innovations are socially accepted
inventions of all kinds: technical, cultural, political, organizational... Torsten
Hägerstrand’s (1952) theory of innovation diffusion shows how larger cities
are more likely to have rapid access to innovations due to their greater social
and economic diversity and due to their more central positions in physical
and social communication networks. Hägerstrand, therefore, created a
hierarchical diffusion model that shows how innovations, especially those he
calls “entrepreneurial innovations”, sometimes at very long distances,
spread, according to the urban hierarchy, following roughly a downward
progression in the size of cities, while the innovations he observed in
agriculture spread in the geographical space from one place to another,
according to an oil spill model. Detailed empirical observations of urban
change over periods of a few decades have confirmed these modalities of
innovation diffusion (Pumain and Saint-Julien 1978) on urban
transformations (see section 1.2.4).
Thus, in these two examples of the shaping of geographical objects, at

two distinct levels, it is understood that the historical duration that allows
these objects to adapt to changes in the forms of social and economic
organization is a very important ingredient in their genesis. In other words,
reasoning that would imply an “instant” emergence of a balance or structure
with synchronous mathematical or computer processes is not really adapted
to the study of the dynamics of geographical objects. Cities, territories, or
landscapes are in fact, according to Philippe Pinchemel’s pretty formula,
“interterrested duration”.
1.2.3. Concentration and accumulation: geographical

inequalities and scaling laws
Two main processes are involved in geography to qualitatively and

quantitatively differentiate noticeable and identifiable entities at a particular
scale or rather at a particular level of observation. The first process, which
can be called “territorialization”, produces mainly qualitative differences. It
induces differentiations, within relatively tight borders, by a kind of “genetic
drift”, which constructs attributes specific to localized entities from the most
frequent interactions within the territory. This process can lead to significant
differences with neighboring territories, for example, in terms of culture,
language, landscape, social practices, and collective rules, at least as long as
borders remain stable or as long as crossing distances only allow sporadic
exchanges with other territories. The second process covers all interactions
of the center-periphery type and the associated network asymmetries
(including possible predations and conquests) and results in quantitative
inequalities between geographical entities. In a given territory or between
connected territories, this process induces inequalities in accumulation or in
concentrations, which generate geographical entities of varying sizes.
The geographical space is, therefore, neither homogeneous nor isotropic.

The objects constructed by social interactions are characterized by strong
asymmetries and hierarchies: thus, the dimensions of cities and territories,
whether measured in terms of population, surface area, wealth, number of
enterprises, or various indicators of notoriety, are always characterized by
very asymmetric statistical distributions, comprising many small units, a
little less medium and very few large ones. The Pareto or Zipf distributions,
or the lognormal law, are the statistical models that best fit these very high
inequalities. Systems of cities thus gather objects that, although bearing the
same name, differ by four orders of magnitude (or powers of 10), grouping
from a few thousand to a few tens of millions of inhabitants. In a highly
connected geographical space subject to the same types of rules of
interaction, the explanation of inequalities between these geographical
objects is given by exponential growth models, according to the “law of
proportional effect” (Gibrat 1931), or by logistic growth models, when the
dimensions of the entities are limited by a certain threshold, for example, a
quantity of available resources.
This growth model is sufficient as a first approximation to characterize

the evolution of inequalities in city size over short time intervals in the
medium term. However, in the long term, inequalities often increase further
due to the qualitative differences associated with size inequalities (Cura et

al. 2017a). Large cities thus generally grow faster than those of the other
cities in the system for which they are the political or economic capital. This
is due not only to the control they can exercise over their system but also to
the hubs or relays they play to connect their territorial unit with other
territorial units (Bretagnolle and Pumain 2010). The trend toward increasing
inequalities and qualitative differentiation of city attributes does not only
concern a few cities at the top of urban hierarchies but also subtly affect the
distribution as a whole. Thus, the larger the cities, the higher the proportion
of innovative activities or skilled jobs in their population. This observation
can be summarized by applying the scaling law model, which is also used
for other complex systems. These statistical models describe, in a formalized
way (by variable exponent power functions), the often non-proportional
relationships that are established over time between the size of an object and
that of one of its parts or certain measures of its activity (the “allometric
growth” studied in the early 20th Century by D’Arcy Thompson). In
biology, among living species, the metabolic rates (energy consumption per
mass unit) of large species are systematically lower than those of small
species, and the relationship between metabolism and size is, therefore,
sublinear, with exponents of less than 1. These laws are explained by the
fractal structure of the networks that distribute energy in living entities (West
et al. 1997). In geography, the scaling laws have exponents greater than 1 for
some urban attributes, such as those that characterize the innovative
functions of cities or the value they produce, while declining or obsolete
activities have lower exponents. A geohistorical interpretation of these
scaling laws links urban concentrations to the ways in which major waves of
innovation are adopted in urban hierarchies (Pumain et al. 2006). The role of
interurban spatial interactions in the evolutionary trajectories of city
populations was confirmed by an experiment with a simulation model on the
subject of Soviet cities (Cottineau 2014 and see Chapter 4). The
mathematical theory of scaling laws, applied to urban systems by
Bettencourt et al. (2007), shows that activities that benefit from the social
incubator role of cities are necessarily hierarchized. According to J.
Raimbault (2019c), hierarchies, whether in the sense of the interweaving of
multiple levels or scales, or of statistical distributions with large tails, would
be endogenous to complex territorial systems (many examples of this type of
socio-spatial organization are presented in Chapter 3).
Contrary to traditional economic theories that predict convergence

(equalization) of satisfaction or productivity levels between regions,
geographical diffusion theory predicts both the maintenance as well as the
catching-up or accentuation of previous inequalities. The ability to exploit

the benefits of an early adoption of innovation often depends on the previous
accumulation (capital) and social complexity (human capital) of the
collective geographical entity, but it can also arise in some places as a result
of the intervention of “individual” actors. Whether it is carried out by
contagion or hierarchically, diffusion does not produce the same effects on
localizations, depending on when it occurs in the trajectory of places, and
also according to the differences in the condition between places thus
connected. The colonization by European countries of many territories in all
parts of the world, which brought together and then interacted strongly with
countries that had very unequal levels of resources and power, has increased
the lasting inequalities between Third World or developing countries. The
complexity of these co-evolutions is expressed, however, by the fact that
these inequalities and the changes that generate them are susceptible to
reversals or bifurcations in their dynamics. The case of China is
representative of this non-stationarity of relative geographical situations: its
technological level was the most advanced at the time of the European
Renaissance, and then its relative position declined until the end of the 20th
Century before rising to the level of second major world power. It would be
interesting to be able to model the evolution of inequalities between the
world’s territories over time as it has resulted in many inversions in the
positions of the main concentrations of wealth and power. For the oldest
periods, the unequal allocations of resources available for the Neolithic
agricultural revolution seem to give an ecological explanation for the
formation of ancient territorial inequalities (Diamond 1997) but the rest of
history shows that the interference between the processes of territorialization
and accumulation–concentration has become much more complex, involving
spatial interactions at a longer distance, up to contemporary globalization.
Social and political domination, coupled with inequalities in economic
wealth, has produced and reproduced center-periphery patterns that have
been exchanged or redistributed differently across the globe throughout the
history of societies.
1.2.4. Spatial change and trajectory dependence
The longevity of geographical constructions is often a surprise to

observers. The persistence of urban hierarchies can be measured over
centuries, while the persistence of functional specializations of cities,
especially the social characteristics associated with them, often exceeds a
few decades. Since the end of the Second World War, the United Nations’
decision not to allow territorial conquests and redrawing of States has also
contributed to the persistence of the division of territorial entities at this
level, which has not totally avoided conflicts, redrawing, and annexation.
However, a change in political regime may be accompanied by territorial
changes for finer constituencies: for example, at the sub-national level,
reorganizations of administrative boundaries took place in Eastern European
countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall (Maurel 2004). Sometimes it is the
evolution of geographical entities themselves, such as cities in demographic
and spatial expansion, which determines a reorganization of boundaries for
the political management of territories (such as the organization of urban
areas in France into “communities of communes” or “communities of
agglomerations”). However, in general, the traced borders move little, or
very slowly, and are sometimes found long after their official disappearance
in the form of “ghost borders” (von Hirchausen 2017).
These continuations are often interpreted as an “inertia” of geographical

space, whose forms indurated physically in the habitat, in the networks, but
also culturally by institutions, in the sometimes long duration of territorial
planning and development procedures, which would show “inertia” and
would oppose the fluidity of social change. On the contrary, careful
observation of cities and territories demonstrates their formidable
adaptability. Despite the apparently fixed nature of buildings, infrastructures,
borders, and nomenclatures, the people who live in these cities and territories
are rapidly renewing themselves (migration and the passing of generations),
and their uses and practices are changing even more quickly. The social
matter of territories and the individual and collective representations
associated with them (“the hearts of Men”) are changing faster than their
form, quoting the beautiful expression of the geographer and writer Julien
Gracq about the city of Nantes.
Figure 1.1 shows a simple representation, both of the persistence of the

spatial organization of the territorial forms of systems of cities and of the
coherence of these forms across the scales of geographical space. Céline
Rozenblat (1995) had the idea of linking European cities (delimited
according to a harmonized definition of morphological agglomerations) of
more than 10,000 inhabitants by a segment of varying length, less than
25 km on a first map (Figure 1.1A), then 25–50 km (Figure 1.1B), and
finally between 150 and 200 km for the cities that are 10 times larger (more
than 100,000 inhabitants) (Figure 1.1C). The result, which is spectacular,
shows on each of the maps the same large territorial areas. To the West, the
urbanization of France and Spain, territories where early centralization in
large kingdoms created high concentrations, shows very contrasting spatial

distributions. In the center, a dense wrap of closer cities characterizes the
states (Germany and Italy) whose national unity, which occurred later,
allowed rival cities, capitals of principalities, or bishoprics, to develop in
competition for a long time (Great Britain, although centralized early on,
belongs to this diagonal because of the intensity of its industrial revolution,
which in the 19th Century filled the urban void in the center of the country
by creating fairly large cities). In the East, cities are spaced much more
evenly, because these regions were urbanized later and were quite
systematically colonized between the 13th and 17th Centuries, often by
religious congregations. This simple representation is testimony to the
strength and durability of the spatial integration of the socio-political
structures established in urban interactions and the solid coherence of the
resulting multi-scalar spatial organizations6. A fairly general property
observed in complex systems, fractality, characterizes the hierarchical and
spatial organization of cities and systems of cities (Tannier 2009 and see also
Chapter 3).
However, the particular conditions of the evolution of political and

territorial social systems are manifested in a strong path dependence (which
I also propose calling historical chaining) and decline this fractality into
three styles of settlement configuration, in Western, Central, and Eastern
Europe, which persist over time, well beyond the conditions that have
prevailed in their settlement. These regularities of city dynamics and their
socio-economic transformations mentioned above are integrated into an
“evolutionary theory of cities” (Pumain 1997). The theory has been used as a
basis for an important collective modeling work in the form of multi-agent
simulation models that are presented in several chapters of this book
(notably Chapters 4 and 5).
6 In a similar approach, by systematically varying distance thresholds within a country and by

percolation on the road network, E. Arcaute et al. (2016) identify the regional, urban, and
local structures of Britain’s spatial organization, as well as their successive interlocking.
Figure 1.1. Three settlement styles in Europe (source: Rozenblat (1995)). For a color
version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/pumain/geographical.zip
The process of change in the geographical space is closely linked to its

functioning. This is the result of a continuous effort of mutual adaptation by
the many actors involved in the social space. The change produces a very
large number of small local movements and transformations, most of which
cancel each other out statistically and have virtually no apparent effect on
spatial patterns. One example is the very small effect of residential migration
on the transformation of territorial inequalities in terms of population
concentrations. Unlike a simplistic representation that would see migration
as a one-way movement, we know at least since Ravenstein (1885) that trade

is always done in both directions, with an almost equal volume. As a result,
the net balance of these movements – the net migration balance – often
represents less than 1% or 2% of the volume of populations that have moved
(Baccaïni 2007). Media representations that anticipate “invasions” by
international migrants are part of the ideological myth. Moreover, the social
compositions of observed movements between regions or departments are
very similar between entry and exit flows. Foreign investment flows into
industrial establishments reinforce existing specialities much more than they
modify them (Finance 2016). In fact, the understanding of this contrast
between extremely volatile micro-geographical processes and seemingly
much more stable spatial structures is now understood as the result of
complex system dynamics.
This fluctuating nature of geographical change usually only produces

incremental effects. When coupled with a strong effect of proximity and
translated by spatial autocorrelations, it can explain the great success in
geography of modeling using cellular automata. Relatively, simple local
transition rules between the states of the cells of a grid representing land use
are thus implemented to represent the transformations and to possibly
anticipate them (Engelen et al. 1995; White et al. 2015). However, when it is
useful to take into consideration spatial forms of interaction, which are not
only related to proximity effects and are more diverse, in the design and scope
of their networks, multi-agent systems are increasingly used as instruments,
for example, to simulate innovation diffusion (Daudé 2004) or the trajectories
of cities in systems of cities and territories (Sanders et al. 2007).
1.2.5. Territorial drifts, space-time compression, and

globalization
In the long history of the human species, the prolonged effects of distance
between isolated groups have paradoxically resulted in territorial “drifts”.
This is a process that geneticists observe in terms of progressive changes in
genetic heritage, and which socially creates significant differences between
languages, cultures, names, and even the visible signs on which concepts of
race and ethnicity were later based7. While the “genetic distance” between
7 F. Cavalli-Sforza’s (1984) book, The Neolithic Transition and the Genetics of Population in
Europe, provides fascinating images of the effect of ancient migrations, greatly constrained by
distance, on the current differentiation of secondary genetic signs between European regions.
human groups remains relatively small, due to their common origin and the
time involved in biological evolution, these social characteristics that evolve
much more rapidly may have diverged very considerably, to the point that
they have sometimes been erected as cultural barriers and conflicts between
nations.
In this respect, the transport revolution of the mid-19th Century really

represents a bifurcation in the world’s history, from the point of view of the
spatiality of societies, insofar as its consequences have not only been a shift
in the center of the world (as has been the case many times since the
Neolithic era, for example, when the center of Europe shifted from the
Mediterranean to the North Sea in the 16th Century, so well described by
Fernand Braudel). The changes we are thinking about are much more
general; they have affected to varying degrees in all parts of the world and
all relationships in the world, as well as the representations we have of them.
We must be aware of the extraordinary distortion that has occurred between
the “physical” distance, measured in kilometers on topographic maps, and
the distance measured by the time required to travel due to the increase in
transport speed as a result of mechanization. The transport revolution has
literally created types of geographical entities and levels of scale that did not
exist before. The American geographer Donald Janelle (1969) proposed the
terms time-space compression and spatial reorganization to categorize these
processes. This is an example of a quantitative change that leads to very
significant qualitative changes. More recently, the considerable acceleration
in the speed of financial transactions, which has taken international
regulators by surprise, has led to economic crises of global proportions, the
effects of which are still difficult to measure in the longer term. It may also
be the case that the acceleration of economic development during the 20th
Century (even more so than population growth, which tends to self-regulate),
by inducing climate change and biodiversity loss, can lead to other major
shifts. Many people consider it necessary to take corrective action to these
human-induced upheavals (which led to the naming of a new geological era
known as the “Anthropocene”) by advocating an “ecological transition”. The
19 sustainable development objectives and 169 targets advocated by the
United Nations are an important first step in this attempt at regulation. It is
likely that the acceleration of social communications via Internet-based
networks will also lead to profound changes in practices and representations.
It is still difficult to determine whether all these upheavals will bring about
new transformations in territorial configurations and in the way we inhabit
Earth. Simulation models of various scenarios can help us think about the
modalities of these possible futures.
For centuries, even millennia, the entire organization of human activities

on the Earth’s surface has been carried out in a space-time system regulated
by low traffic speeds. In this spatial system subject to the “tyranny of
distance”, we, therefore, had geographical entities of daily life, which were
defined as small contiguous regions, which included places connected by
strong but short-range interactions. However, the role of these slow speed
relationships in the construction of interactions with much longer spans
should not be overlooked. Geographical entities may have formed at higher
levels of scale (e.g. the empires of Central Asia, well studied by
P. Frankopan (2017)), due to the slow spread of information and innovations
(e.g. the spread of Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam, technological
innovations, or even political forms in the pre-industrial world). Exchange
networks have sometimes been established over very long periods of time
(consider the ancient Silk Road, the role of Venice in the integration of
Mediterranean trade from the 13th to the 15th Century, or the cities of
Hanseatic League in northern Europe) as well as in warlike undertakings and
matrimonial and diplomatic strategies of conquest, domination, or
integration. These slow but far-reaching relationships have produced
political entities and economic networks of much larger dimensions than the
territories of daily life, defined at a more elementary level of scale, and
punctuated by the life of the fields or the formation of agricultural markets.
However, from the beginning of the 19th Century, very suddenly on the
historical scale of time, the obstacle created by distance was considerably
reduced. We see here the interest in considering socially significant distance,
which regulates the intensity and frequency of social interactions, and which
is expressed in units of transport cost, or time sacrificed to travel, or
possibilities of access to information. Only this distance makes it possible to
understand the structures of the geographical space envisaged as a space of
social relations, or produced by social interactions.
The effects of space-time compression on the spatial organization of

systems of cities are not well-known to the general public. As a result of the
repeated adjustments of all movements, the increase in speeds widens the
scope and spatial influence of the centers, which can now attract a more
distant clientele. The latter also finds it advantageous to visit a larger, better-
equipped center. Thus, in the second half of the 20th Century, motorized
French populations became accustomed to frequenting regional capitals for
their use of services much more than the departmental capitals, planned at
the time of the French Revolution to be located within reach of the
inhabitants. As a result, there is a tendency to increase inequalities between
centers, a “simplification from the bottom” of urban hierarchies. When this

simplification from below occurs in a period of urbanization of populations,
population growth, and living standards (which leads to the creation of new
functions and jobs everywhere, even in the smallest centers), this decrease in
the weight of small centers is only perceptible in relative terms (in that they
grow less quickly than large ones). However, this is no longer the case when
there is no longer a reserve of rural population to feed them or when the
slower enrichment no longer makes it possible to equip them again. As a
result, small and medium-sized cities are threatened, and their probability of
development weakens on average even if local elected officials refuse to
accept this fate (Baron et al. 2010). Many questions about shrinking cities
have sometimes neglected this heavy spatial trend in their explanatory
diagrams. Of course, the trend is still not very noticeable in emerging
countries due to the high population growth and the rural exodus that
continue there, but it is likely that the processes outlined earlier, reinforced
by the financialization of urban development, will eventually produce
similar effects there.
The resumption of the growth of small and medium-sized cities becomes

more likely again if they are “brought closer”, also by the contraction of
space-time, to a still-expanding center. The geographical concept of the
contraction of space-time invites us to do another reading of urban
development and of the recurrent “theories” of a “counter-urbanization”
(Berry 1976; Champion and Hugo 2004; Van den Berg et al. 1982). Is there
a contemporary decline in city centers, to the benefit of the urban periphery?
Is the “renewal of rural municipalities” on the agenda? Does the emergence
of satellite cities, the edge cities, go against the theory of the tendency to
strengthen centers? In fact, in an unchanging support space, which would be
represented, for example, by a circle 30 km in radius, the growth of an
isolated medium-sized city seems to propagate in a wave-like manner from
the center to the rural periphery. However, if we imagine a space-time,
represented by a circle or a dendritic figure of about 45 min around the
center (i.e. with an expanding surface in the support space), then it is likely
that we will observe a more permanent dichotomy between a center, a
growing urban space, and a declining rural periphery – with, of course, the
short-term fluctuations that characterize the processes of territorial growth
and adaptation.
More generally, the replacement of the concept of topographic space,

where distances are measured in terms of physical distance, by a concept of
geographical space that is relative in evolution as it is constructed by the
relationships between places, measured in social terms of cost (especially for

long distances) and time (for shorter distances), is a necessary change from
dominant representations, which can lead to a better appreciation of the
permanence and transformations of geographical entities. For example, the
contemporary process of the re-emergence of “countries” is most often
interpreted as expressing a retreat into smaller local areas than the regional
framework, which would be considered too vast for development leadership.
In the light of the increasing spatial scope of interactions, this process could
just as easily be interpreted as an extension: in terms of possibilities for
social interactions, today’s “country” would be the equivalent of the village
or commune of the past. Similarly, the “fragmentations” into smaller states
observed in some regions of the world could also be read as the formation of
new interactions, at geographical levels hitherto ignored by the spatial
integration processes acting within the framework of the large dismembered
states (Pumain 1997).
1.3. Conclusion
These geographically specific conceptions of complexity induce

modeling practices that are partly discipline-specific. They are detailed in the
following chapters of this book. Geographic modeling is quite often multi-
scale in principle, giving itself the freedom to define its “agents”, not always
as individuals or actors but also as collectives, geographical entities of
variable importance. These representations by computer science or
mathematical formalization are thus carried out at several levels: micro-,
meso-, or macro-geographic. The choice of their attributes is closely linked
to the scale of the entities, the epistemological choices, and the questions
asked (see Chapter 2). Geographical modeling uses stylized facts from
empirical observations more often than fully logic-deductive models. Due to
the “geolocation” of the data used, specific methods are implemented in the
coupling of models with geographic information systems and by the
deployment of appropriate spatial analysis methods.
Among the many definitions of complexity, “the number of non-

equivalent interpretations that an observer can make of a system” (Livet
1983) seems to us to be appropriate for the systems that the humanities and
social sciences study. Indeed, each discipline: psychology, sociology,
economics, and so on, produces its own representations and interpretations
of complex processes, and it is these interpretations that must be articulated
in an attempt to account for social objects and processes. The contribution of
geography to the construction of this knowledge mainly concerns the spatial

dimension. It proposes an interpretation of planetary and world diversity,
based on its “natural” and socially constructed origins, by specifying the
processes of resource exploitation and inequalities in geolocalized
interactions at several levels of observation. The resulting geodiversity is
perhaps the most historically secure engine of social change, first by
encouraging people to look elsewhere, and then to network, always
encouraging emulation, even if predation often prevails. Current dynamic
models now make it possible to explain the diversity of geographical objects
(territories, cities, regions, networks, and systems of cities) no longer
through the completion of a biographical narrative but as one of the possible
outcomes of a set of complex interactive processes. The aim is not to replace
geographical processes (ecological and socio-spatial) with explanatory
processes that would be relevant for other systems, but rather to propose an
explanation of the observed evolutions that is part (to be determined) of
more general evolutionary dynamics common to a number of systems and
that can be abstracted in models, mathematics, or computer science.
In the other chapters of this book, we will see how the difficulties
inherent in introducing more than two levels of the time and space scale in
the models are overcome, taking into account the heterogeneity of agents
and the variability of behaviors in models, and in representing time
compression in emergence processes.
2
Choosing Models to Explain the Dynamics

of Cities and Territories
2.1. Introduction
As the title of the chapter suggests, this contribution focuses on the

choices made throughout a modeling process. The subject is vast and here it
is delimited, on the one hand, by a thematic field, which is that of
geography, and, on the other hand, by an objective that is to explain a
phenomenon. The path between formulating a set of questions to explain a
phenomenon linked to the dynamics of cities or territories and developing a
model designed to respond to them, or at least to open up avenues for
reflection, is indeed punctuated by a whole series of choices. The
methodological approach that a researcher chooses to adopt depends both on
his objective and on his disciplinary habits and know-how. His choices are
not always made in a linear manner and are often based on implicit
positions. For example, in response to the same thematic question on the
evolution of socio-spatial inequalities in a given territory, one will adopt a
qualitative approach based on semi-directive interviews, the other a
quantitative approach based on statistical analyses of census data, while a
third will turn to agent simulation models. The scope of possibilities thus
remains very wide and it will be impossible to be exhaustive in this chapter.
The objective is to show a set of nodes within a wide network of approaches,
methods, and models that the researcher investigates on the dynamics of
cities and the uses of territories. The first step is to specify the object of
interest, particularly the phenomenon that we are trying to explain. Empirical
examples will be used to establish the reasoning behind concrete cases of
Chapter written by Lena SANDERS.
Geographical Modeling: Cities and Territories,

First Edition. Edited by Denise Pumain.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Chapter 1. Complexity in Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter 2. Choosing Models to Explain the Dynamics of

2.2. Explaining by reasons or laws: choosing an

Chapter 3. Effects of Distance and Scale Dependence in

Chapter 4. Incremental Territorial Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

4.2.2. General/specific/singular . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 109

Chapter 5. Methods for Exploring Simulation Models . . . . . 125

Chapter 6. Model Visualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

6.2.3. Visualizing a model means learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

List of Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

Never has geography been so present in our societies. For centuries,

In France, geographic learning has been a requirement for all students in

Introduction written by Denise PUMAIN.

Critics of models often denounce oversimplification, or selection bias,

data mining models, for the validation of an analytical theory (economic

Several publications have already proposed more or less ambitious

The book we propose here is part of a multidisciplinary collection. It is

Transferring scientific language, concepts, methods, and instruments

Chapter written by Denise PUMAIN.

Geographical Modeling: Cities and Territories,

irreversibility of the trajectories of their objects, the near impossibility of

1.1. A first bifurcation in the epistemology of geographic

Geography appears among the humanities and social sciences as one of

This is a paradox: indeed, until recently, geography seemed to be a “soft

However, in everyday language as in many representations of common

according to a somewhat “vertical” interpretation of its relationship with the

1.1.1. “Vertical” explanations for the “science of places, not

2 The expression in quotation marks is by Vidal de la Blache, with the intention of

idiosyncrasies have been the subject of numerous demonstrations denying the

1.1.2. “Horizontal” explanations for the science of the spatiality

3 “Open-system thinking, however, directs attention to the heterogeneity of spatial

In fact, these early geographic models validate what American

It was the American geographer Edward Ullmann who, in 1954, proposed

The geography that is built on these foundations (Abler et al. 1977) is

The translation into French of Peter Haggett’s book (Locational Analysis

1.1.3. The discussed status of modeling

Since the 1970s, attempts at modeling in geography have been subject to

Institute, who denounced both a “scientific adventurism”, “quantitative

The dissociation between Marxist interpretations and the use of

and methodologically. The successive waves of radical geography,

According to our constructive perspective for modeling, proposals

1.2. Modeled regularities

The history, the forms of political and economic organization of societies,

These major regularities of spatial organization and evolution of space