Vincent Laperrière

We present a model showing the evolution of an organization of agents who discuss democratically about good practices. This model feeds on a field work we did for about twelve years in France where we followed NPOs, called AMAPs, and observed their construction through time at the regional and national level. Most of the hypothesis we make here are either based on the literature on opinion di usion or on the results of our field work. By defining dynamics where agents influence each other, make collective decision at the group level, and decide to stay in or leave their respective groups, we analyse the e ect of di erent forms of vertical communication that is meant to spread good practices within the organization. Our main indicators of the good functioning of the democratic dynamics are stability and representativeness. We show that if communication about norms is well designed, it has a positive impact on both stability and representativeness. Interestingly the e ect of communication increases with the number of dimensions discussed in the groups. Communication about norms is thus a valuable tool to use in groups that wish to improve their democratic practices without jeopardizing stability.

Health geographics is a fast-developing research area. Subjects broached in scientific literature are most varied, ranging from vectorial diseases to access to healthcare, with a recent revival of themes such as the implication of health in the Smart City, or a predominantly individual-centered approach. Far beyond standard meta-analyses, the present study deliberately adopts the standpoint of questioning space in its foundations, through various authors of the International Journal of Health Geographics, a highly influential journal in that field. The idea is to find space as the common denominator in this specialized literature, as well as its relation to spatial analysis, without for all that trying to tend towards exhaustive approaches. 660 articles have being published in the journal since launch, but 359 articles were selected based on the presence of the word “Space” in either the title, or the abstract or the text over 13 years of the journal’s existence. From that database, a lexical analysis (tag cloud) reveals the perception of space in literature, and shows how approaches are evolving, thus underlining that the scope of health geographics is far from narrowing.

This work addresses the spread of a disease within an urban system, definedas a network of interconnected cities. The first step consists of comparing two differentapproaches: a macroscopic one, based on a system of coupled Ordinary DifferentialEquations (ODE) Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) systems exploiting populations onnodes and flows on edges (so-called metapopulational model), and a hybrid one, couplingODE SIR systems on nodes and agents traveling on edges. Under homogeneous conditions(mean field approximation), this comparison leads to similar results on the outputs on whichwe focus (the maximum intensity of the epidemic, its duration and the time of the epidemicpeak). However, when it comes to setting up epidemic control strategies, results rapidlydiverge between the two approaches, and it appears that the full macroscopic model is notcompletely adapted to these questions. In this paper, we focus on some control strategies,which are quarantine, avoidance and risk culture, to explore the differences, advantages anddisadvantages of the two models and discuss the importance of being hybrid when modelingand simulating epidemic spread at the level of a whole urban system.