Geographical Modeling

4Incremental Territorial Modeling

Cities and territories are complex entities which geography approaches at a mesoscopic scale, between the levels of social individuals and regional or continental groups. Therefore, cities and territories are considered both as products emerging from local social interactions and as “collective agents” supporting higher-level interactions, such as interurban interactions. For instance, while such interactions originally stem from individual choices, they are organized according to the aggregated and emerging properties of cities. This duality (in the representation of territories and the representation of their interactions) matters in the dynamic modeling of cities¹ and geographical territories.

A central question is, therefore, how to represent cities and territories in the models. Symbolic representation options (e.g. distribution of densities, functions, size, and mesh size) are at the heart of the geographical discipline, yet there has been little thought given to this question in the history of modeling. The relative lack of discussion about the representation of territories in geographical models is likely due to the appropriation of theories, methods, and models from other disciplines whose focus was not the territory. In this chapter, we seek to illustrate the importance of territorial representation by referring to a substrate closer to the discipline: cartographic modeling. Indeed, the choices of representation in maps, familiar ...