Geographical Modeling

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 ...