5. Geosimulation: Modeling Spatial Processes

The philosophy of geosimulation is to model spatial processes either as auto-correlative physical geographical processes or as cross-correlative socio-spatial processes. This chapter refers to the latter and stresses that conflating social and spatial phenomena in time needs to consider scale, in all three dimensions, as an explicit distinctive factor to adequately understand the interlinked processes at hand. With respect to residential segregation modeling, it is illustrated that agent-based simulation models mainly focus on the individual, local, and short-term scale in order to detect the generative mechanisms which lead to socially, spatially, and temporarily large-scale structures. The chapter argues that, although leading to thought-provoking results, this bottom-up approach should be complemented by an explicit macro-scale implementation of social and spatial structures. In so doing, social and regional circumstances for ancient societies can be analyzed more comprehensively. Contemporary agent-based modeling and geographic information systems’ software tools are capable of incorporating such complexities.