A team of geographers and economists join in 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, regional development. Tools are borrowed from various disciplines (cartography, economics, geographical information systems, mathematical programming, statistics,…).
Current research areas
Research in geography at CORE is concentrated in the areas of human and economic geography, with a quantitative and theoretical orientation but keeping in mind the utility of the research results in land-use planning policy. The four major research areas are:
- Location-allocation models: modelling the optimal location of private and public firms
- Development of models, algorithms and heuristics
- Applications to real-world land-use planning case studies at the local, regional or supra-national levels
- Sensitivity analyses of the results to the various inputs of the models such as demand, externalities, the transportation network, etc.
- Spatial data quantitative analyses:use of quantitative methods to analyse spatial data (spatial econometrics, fractals, thematic mapping, ...)
- Particular interest to sensitivity analyses and to associated methodological problems such a data aggregation, endogeneity, neighbourhood effects or spatial autocororelation
- Application to road accidents, housing structure, migrations, health or jobs location.
- Transport geography in a sustainable mobility context: especially topics such as the 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.
- Models in human and economic geography: development and empirical application of models in spatial analysis
- Relationship between the location of the economic activities and the human organisation
- Models and applications
- Examples: modelling migration and the border effect, modelling the urban sprawl, modelling the urban-rural fringe, etc.
