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

Evolution and entropy in the organization of urban street patterns

Mohajeri, N; French, JR; Batty, M; (2013) Evolution and entropy in the organization of urban street patterns. Annals of GIS , 19 (1) 1 - 16. 10.1080/19475683.2012.758175. Green open access

[thumbnail of 10.1080-19475683.2012.758175.pdf]
Preview
PDF
10.1080-19475683.2012.758175.pdf

Download (1MB)

Abstract

The street patterns of cities are the result of long-term evolution and interaction between various internal, social and economic, and external, environmental and landscape, processes and factors. In this article, we use entropy as a measure of dispersion to study the effects of landscapes on the evolution and associated street patterns of two cities: Dundee in Eastern Scotland and Khorramabad in Western Iran, cities which have strong similarities in terms of the size of their street systems and populations but considerable differences in terms of their evolution within the landscape. Landscape features have strong effects on the city shape and street patterns of Dundee, which is primarily a shoreline city, while Khorramabad is primarily located within mountainous and valley terrain. We show how cumulative distributions of street lengths when graphed as log-log plots show abrupt changes in their straight-line slopes at lengths of about 120 m, indicating a change in street functionality across scale: streets shorter than 120 m are primarily local streets, whereas longer streets are mainly collectors and arterials. The entropy of a street-length population varies positively over its average length and length range which is the difference between the longest and the shortest streets in a population. Similarly, the entropies of the power law tails of the street populations of both cities have increased during their growth, indicating that the distribution of street lengths has gradually become more dispersed as these cities have expanded. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Type: Article
Title: Evolution and entropy in the organization of urban street patterns
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/19475683.2012.758175
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19475683.2012.758175
Additional information: © 2013 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment
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 BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1388242
Downloads since deposit
354Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item