International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

That part of space totally or partially controlled by a living system, an ecosystem, or a sociosystem.

K. BOULDING, who discussed the concept of territoriality, wrote that: "It is relevant to the theory of niche and to the determinants of niches. Thus any organization in competition with others will find that its advantage in the interaction diminishes as it goes away from some kind of 'home base', so that at some point the advantages of any further expansion fall to zero. This is what I have called the "boundary of equal advantage" between two organizations, but the concept could easily be generalized. It is these boundaries of equal advantage which really define the niches of an ecological system. Economy has made an important contribution through location theory, especially in the work of LÖSCH (1944 and 1954), who demonstrated that, even if we start with resources and population distributed uniformly in the geographical field, the sheer pressures of maximizing behavior will force the field into clusters and structures and wiII indeed create what are in effect niches in what previously had been an uniform field" (1972, p.69-70).

It should be noted that the pioneering work in location theory was made by W. CHRISTALLER in 1923 (1933 and 1937).

→ Hexagonal space filling, and possibly, fractals