Une application de Recherche et d’Information sur les systèmes de peuplement des Déserts
Résumé
During the past recent years, arid and semi arid spaces have met a renewal of concern from the governing body, the public and the scientists as well. This materializes notably in the fact that the UN declared 2006 "year of the deserts and desertification". However, if the theme sometimes is backed by global steps, for example in climatology, researches done in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) are often confronted with a scattering of datas and for this reason, they usually are confined to the partial monographic studies which makes the comparison and the generalization very difficult. This is not surprising since arid and semi arid spaces extend over the whole continent covering one third of the emerged lands and overlapping with dozens of states. Then the construction of corpus from data from now on, places itself with an increasing acuteness in order to achieve a progress in getting to know the arid and semi arid spaces. It means, more precisely, in the way the societies live and change the deserts and the type of interrelations between this social change and the environments. Such an exercise has a great heuristic interest as the deserts are still considered as exceptions for their shift with the general tendencies, like a kind of permanent departures from the rule because of the low densities, discontinuities of the settlement, the recent urbanization process, specificities of the arid ecosystems... ARID project aims at an understanding of the dynamics of the deserts from a social and spatial side, through the making of vast, diverse and multiscaled corpus from spatial data. The multiplication of the cities makes up the heart of this change. The millionaire cities extend till the deserts like: Cairo, Teheran, Nouakchott… until the most arid zones where the multiplication of small and medium cities as for consequence a percentage of urbanization closes to 80 %. We still have difficulties in determining the quantitative and qualitative aspects of this process and its spatial manifestations. The migration flow is often the correlation of the urbanization processes: the internal flow heading towards the cities; the flow of the laborers in search of a seasonal job in building sites that are multiplying in the deserts (hydraulic projects, extraction of raw materials, jobs of the tertiary sector…); the international flow of seasonal laborers or flow of transit like the Africans who cross the Sahara on their migration to the Maghreb and Europe; and finally the thousands of refugees from the environment or the war. Lastly, urbanization and migration are doubly related to the arid and semi-arid ecosystems since they take part of their transformation as much as they are could be consequence of the global climatic changes (desertification in particular) according to significant nuances related on the places and the scales of observation. This dialectical of the relations between the social changes and the environments is a major subject whose comprehension passes inevitably by the constitution of specific corpuses. ARID project aims also at conceiving an application to access, extract and treat these corpuses from data accessible through a server with network services and distant access or through the Intra or the Internet. Concluding hence the importance of the spatial information and the increase of modes of distant access, we are addressing three types of users: 1) non specialist interested in a product as "atlas"; 2) the community of HSS in demand of simple tools of requests and extraction of scientifically validated spatial data through an application; 3) specialists of complex systems participating in a permanent software workshop focused on the exploration of map languages. ARID project is situated then between the corpuses and the tools of the research in the humanities and social sciences, as a fundamental step of research programs. In return, these programs are thought as ways to test and improve the application in a constant dialogue between the academics and doctoral students of the HSS field from one side and complex systems from the other side. We distinguish three sections of complementary and equally important research: 1) the conception of an auto executable application allowing easy distant access to data bases; 2) a documentary section founded on the collection and transformation of spatial numeric sources on contemporary Egypt; 3) a theme and exploration section with the objective of building corpuses of satellite images and data of Remote Sensing) in order to inquire precise themes and places reflecting the diversity of arid and semi arid spaces (Egypt, China, Burkina Faso, Libya, Mauritania).
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