Removal and contraction are basic operations for several methods conceived in order to handle irregular image pyramids, for multi-level image analysis for instance. Such methods are often based upon graph-like representations which do not maintain all topological information, even for 2-dimensional images. We study the definitions of removal and contraction operations in the generalized maps framework. These combinatorial structures enable us to unambiguously represent the topology of a well-known class of subdivisions of n-dimensional (discrete) spaces. The results of this study make a basis for a further work about irregular pyramids of n-dimensional images.