Geographical Modeling

1Complexity 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 ...