ROOTS — Why measure territorial presence

What the map no longer tells us

Standard demographic and sociological instruments cannot do one thing: distinguish a community that still lives in a territory from one that merely has its memory living there. Census figures count individuals at a point in time. They record declared affiliations and locate infrastructures. They do not measure vitality — the capacity of a presence to reproduce, to transmit, and to resist the centrifugal pressures of emigration, residential mobility, secularisation, or economic crisis.

This gap is especially acute for minority faith communities, whose territorial presence is both their historical substrate and the condition of their symbolic survival. A Lebanese-Christian village counting 200 people can be a living bastion — active school, functioning parish, investing diaspora — or a territory in effacement, where the 200 are mostly elderly and houses are sold every season. The census cannot tell the difference. ROOTS is designed to.

Two maps, three figures

At the heart of ROOTS lies a simple but decisive distinction: every communal presence unfolds simultaneously across a visible map — infrastructure, economy, governance, built fabric — and an invisible map — identity, memory, diaspora, symbolic value, and confidence in the future.

These three figures describe the visible map — what can be measured, photographed, counted. But a place can have lost its inhabitants while keeping an intense invisible presence — the shrine people return to, the story still told, a diaspora that invests and remembers. Conversely, a still-inhabited place may have already lost its invisible map: the young no longer transmit, the rites fade, the link to the homeland frays.

This is the core tension ROOTS is built to read: what happens when the two maps stop matching each other?

Eight dimensions, one diagnosis

ROOTS translates this framework into eight operational questions, split into two registers. The first four probe the visible map — what allows a place to still welcome, retain, and function. The next four probe the invisible map — what keeps a place alive in minds, hearts, and networks, even as it empties physically.

Each dimension is scored 0–10. The result produces two distinct sub-scores — a visible presence score and an invisible presence score — whose combination determines the territorial figure (Bastion, Mixed Zone, Lost Territory) and the dominant map (Visible, Invisible, or Balanced). It is precisely this crossed reading — not a single global mark — that makes the diagnosis useful: a reading of the tension between what remains physically and what endures within.

What ROOTS aims to build

A note on method

Scores are perceptions, not objective measurements. Two respondents from the same place may diverge significantly depending on their social, generational, or geographic position. This subjectivity is a deliberate design choice, not a flaw: the dispersion of scores is itself information. ROOTS is a mode of reading territory, not a verdict on it.