Questions of uncertainty in geography

Giovanni Fusco, Matteo Caglioni, Karine Emsellem, Myriam Merad, Diego Moreno and Christine Voiron-Canicio

Environment and Planning A, 2017, vol. 49, issue 10, 2261-2280

Abstract: The concept of uncertainty has fostered in the last decade’s fundamental and applied research in different disciplinary fields. Couclelis (2003) clearly demonstrated the pervasiveness of uncertainty in the production process of geographical knowledge. The paper shares this epistemological point of view. Pragmatically, its goal is to show how questions of uncertainty arise in the praxis of geographic research. It suggests that scientific work can be enriched, and not hindered, by addressing uncertainty in knowledge. The paper discusses eight domains within the activity of the geographer, where questions of uncertainty arise: geographic information, geographic definitions, the explanation of geographic phenomena, the complexity of spatial systems, geosimulation, the representation of spatial knowledge, subjectivity in spatial phenomena, and planning. Within each domain uncertainty issues are identified as well as their possible interrelations.

Keywords: Uncertainty; geographic knowledge; geographic concepts; geographic information; planning; complexity; geosimulation; visualization; subjective space (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X17718838 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:49:y:2017:i:10:p:2261-2280

DOI: 10.1177/0308518X17718838

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().