Supranational study of population potential: Spain and France

Abstract

Nowadays, people divide their activities into different spaces and times, often depending on information and transport networks. Moreover, each social group generates an interaction with others in terms of social, economic and functional activities. These relationships are complicated to display, however an approach can be made from potential models. Population potential is one of the most fruitful adaptations of Physics laws to the field of Human Geography.The gravity model suggests that two separate groups of people, say in two cities, generate a mutual interaction proportional to the product of their sizes, and that this interaction is impeded by the frictional effect of the intervening distance over which it must take place (Rich, 1980. Potential models in human geography. Concepts and Techniques in Modern Geography, 26. University of East Anglia, Norwich).Population potential indicates the intensity of possible interactions between social or economic groups at different locations. Therefore, it is an index of the nearness of people to one another and a measure of the influence of people at a distance. This study uses a variant of the gravity model, adding the population of each cell to the total potential calculated for it.The result of this work is a raster map (5-km cell size) for Spain and France in 2008, at a scale of 1:5,350,000. This map uses a sequential color scheme to represent population potential and to illustrate the broad spatial distributions and interactions of population. This is a useful tool for functional and demographic analysis which supplements other population representations by density or symbol size.