Chapter 2

Location and Space

The book proper starts with a look at what many consider geography’s key distinctive focus, namely space. This is often, in more GIS-adjacent settings understood as location, which led me directly to Whitehead’s arresting dismissal of simple location as an idea, something to which we return in Chapter 8. This chapter considers geographical theories about space and how space is—and potentially could be—represented in giscience. Many of the figures relate to some of the more interesting ways in which giscience represents space.

Links for Chapter 2

As marketing copy, this one is always already out of date. As of November 2023, the most direct reference to location on the Esri website is here: esri.com/en-us/arcgis/produ…

Figure 2.1 A representation of an absolute space

A simple visualisation of geo-atoms in absolute space

Figures 2.2 and 2.3 and more on cartograms

The cartograms in Figure 2.2 were made using ScapeToad (linked here). They are examples of Gastner-Newman cartograms, popularised by Danny Dorling at the World Mapper website…

Figure 2.4 Two point patterns in absolute space

Although it is labelled ‘point patterns in absolute space’, the real (ahem) point of this figure is that spatial analysis often works, in effect, with a relative concept of…

Figures 2.6 Slivers and gaps in a polygon layer

Here is how slivers and gaps can happen…

Figure 2.7 Voronoi polygons associated with a set of point locations

This is most conveniently made using spatstat, but I’ve shown it here making a point pattern into an sf dataset and then using sf::st_voronoi().

Figure 2.8 Voronoi polygons associated with lines and polygons

This figure was mostly prepared in QGIS, but an R version is provided here to show the steps involved.

Figure 2.9 A range of spatial weights applied to polygon data

This figure is intended to demonstrate the diversity of possible conceptualisations of ‘neighbour’ that are often deployed in spatial analysis contexts, and represent…

Discussion questions

As this chapter argues, the nature of space is fundamental to geography and to giscience.

© 2023-24 David O’Sullivan