THE ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISIONS OF MAINLAND FRANCE AS 2D RANDOM CELLULARSTRUCTURES

The topological properties and some metric properties of the administr ative divisions of mainland France in departments and in districts hav e been investigated. They do not differ from the properties which are usually measured in biological tissues. This confirms the restricted v ariability of the topological correlations amongst disordered 2D cellu lar structures with comparable values of mu2, the variance of the dist ribution of the number of cell sides. The planar point processes P1 an d P2 constituted by the chief towns of departments and of districts re spectively have been compared to a reference process formed by the eig envalues of asymmetric complex random matrices. Process P2 is fairly a ccounted for by the latter model while the interaction between the poi nts of P1 is more repulsive.