At the scale of the neighborhood: “the texture”

rks are arranged. This description of local arrangement will account for the differences of spatial organization between urban districts whose constituent elements are often identical: zones of individual or collective habitat, parks industrial and commercial areas, …

Just like the structure, the texture expresses the arrangement of properties (thematic) in space, but at a larger scale. This change of scale corresponds to a fitting of the spatial entities, namely the units of observation. In order to characterize for example the texture of build up areas, it will be necessary to handle the elements which constitute them, i.e. the units of observation defined at a larger scale. This constraint affects much more the object mode than the image mode. Indeed, we saw that in image mode, the functional spatial objects consist of a set of contiguous units of observation, the regions. It is consequently possible to describe at the same time the structure by spatial arrangement of the regions and their texture by arrangement of the cells.

This strict presentation of texture can fall under a broader concept of spatial arrangement of neighborhood at the same local scale. It is a question of operatinga contextual analysis to relate the property of a unit of observation with those of its neighborhood, such as illustrated on figure 3.2. In this Unit, we will retain the vaster concept of spatial arrangement of neighborhood and will approach the methods of contextual analysis applied principally to information in image mode. In the literature, one finds these terms of analysis of texture, of context and of neighborhood applied to situations of various description of spatial arrangement. To simplify our matter and also to highlight the vast potential of these methods within the framework of the spatial analysis, we will regard these three terms as equivalents.