A multidisciplinary team conducted by geographers focuses on studying the location of human activities, which encompasses the movements of persons and goods and the impact on the environment. Different spatial levels of analysis are covered, including the behavior of firms and households, the structure of urban areas, the systems of cities, and regional development. Tools are borrowed from various disciplines, such as cartography, economics, geographical information systems, mathematical programming, and statistics.
Current Research Areas
Research in geography at CORE is focused on human and economic geography, with a quantitative and theoretical orientation, keeping in mind the usefulness of the research results in policy and planning. The four major research areas are:
Models in human and economic geography: Relationship between the location of economic activities and the built-up morphologies
- Development of quantitative theoretical models;
- Applications of the models on real case studies;
- Examples of ongoing researches: modeling urban sprawl, modeling the urban-rural fringe, urban morphometrics, etc.
Quantitative analyzes of spatial data: Spatial econometrics, fractals, thematic mapping, community detection, etc.
- Sensitivity analyzes and associated methodological problems such a data aggregation, endogeneity, neighborhood effects, or spatial autocorrelation;
- Examples of applications using census data and big data: road accidents, housing, migrations, health, phone data, jobs location, etc.
Transport geography in a sustainable mobility context
- Relationship between the location of human/economic activities and the shape of the transportation network;
- Indicators for measuring the shape of the transportation network or for measuring accessibility, mobility and sustainable transportation problems.
Location-allocation models: Modeling the optimal location of private and public firms
- Development of models, algorithms and heuristics;
- Sensitivity analyzes of the results to the various inputs of the models such as demand, externalities, the transportation network, etc.;
- Applications to real-world land-use planning case studies at the local, regional or supra-national levels.