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spatial interaction — English
The permanent or temporary movement of people and/or goods and/or information from one place (point) on the Earth’s surface to another point. Since the occurrence of people, conditions and phenomena vary over the Earth’s surface (see “spatial distribution”, “spatial variation” and “spatial economy”), people have always interacted with people that are separated from them by space. The volume of interaction over space has increased as technology has developed. A hundred years ago, if took weeks by sea to get from London to Cape Town, today it requires a few hours by air. Together with people, objects also move around. Goods are transfered all over by means of communication networks such as roads, railways, shipping routes, courier services, the airways and so on. The development of the internet immeasurably added to spatial interaction on Earth. Enormous volumes of information are transferred over space by means of the Internet. Despite modern technology spatial interaction is still restricted by distance, and the further things are apart the less interaction takes place between them. This is called distance decay. And the gravity model – based on Newtonian physics that a larger body exerts a strong gravitational attraction on a smaller body – is still as much part of geographic theory as it has always been.
