UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Entropy Measures of Street-Network Dispersion: Analysis of Coastal Cities in Brazil and Britain

Mohajeri, Nahid; French, Jon R; Gudmundsson, Agust; (2013) Entropy Measures of Street-Network Dispersion: Analysis of Coastal Cities in Brazil and Britain. Entropy , 15 (9) pp. 3340-3360. 10.3390/e15093340. Green open access

[thumbnail of entropy-2013-15-03340.pdf]
Preview
Text
entropy-2013-15-03340.pdf - Published Version

Download (4MB) | Preview

Abstract

Geographical location and landforms of various types have strong effects on the developments of many cities and associated street networks. This study presents new results of landform effects, in particular the geometry of shorelines, on the grid street networks (a total of 10,442 streets) of three Brazilian coastal cities. The results are compared with the street networks of three coastal cities in Britain (a total of 22,002 streets) that have evolved through a more natural “bottom-up” process. Gibbs/Shannon entropy (a measure of dispersion) generally has a positive linear correlation with length ranges and the average lengths of the street, and for the power-law tails in particular. The geometry of the adjacent shorelines has great effect on the spatial orientation of streets in the Brazilian cities but less so for the networks of the British cities. More specifically, the more curved the shoreline, the greater is the dispersion in the street orientation and the greater the associated entropy. The results also show that the length-entropies of the outer parts of the Brazilian cities are generally lower than those of the inner parts, whereas the entropies of outer parts of the British cities are higher than those of the inner parts, indicating dispersion during street-network growth in the British cities.

Type: Article
Title: Entropy Measures of Street-Network Dispersion: Analysis of Coastal Cities in Brazil and Britain
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.3390/e15093340
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e15093340
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
Keywords: Size distribution; entropy; dispersion; landforms
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Bartlett School Env, Energy and Resources
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10200246
Downloads since deposit
1Download
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item