The emergent non-equilibrium structure of the urban system depends on the interactions of its actors, whether the structure includes institutions, firms, households, or aggregations of these. Significant attention is given to a plethora of interrelated urban issues such as segregation, pollution, and access to infrastructure and services, spanning all levels of complexity. However, it can be applied more generally, especially in cases where details are either unknown or ill defined, such as in urban systems or cities.Ĭities are complex and have often been viewed through the lens of systems in an attempt to better understand the numerous complex processes and structures that form a greater whole. This statistical formulation, when applied at the microscopic level, is equivalent to the Boltzmann and Gibbs formulations. Jaynes, states that, this statistical measure, when maximized subject to any known constraints, leads to the most likely distribution. The principle of maximum entropy, first formulated by E.T. In the 1940s, Claude Shannon introduced a statistical measure of “information content” which, due to its obvious similarities to the Boltzmann and Gibbs formulations, was also named entropy. Since then, the thermodynamic formulation has been shown to be equivalent to the molecular statistical formulations of entropy by Ludwig Boltzmann and Josiah Gibbs. It is the second definition that proves to be a source of much confusion since this figurative sense is often conflated with the more strictly defined physical and statistical senses.Įntropy first entered the corpus of thermodynamics in the 1850s with Rudolf Clausius’s formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as a measure of the quality of heat energy in relation to temperature, and a characterization of irreversibility. The first definition comes from physics, and it may be argued to be equivalent to a special case of the third, information statistical, definition, applied at the microscopic level. Oxford Dictionaries defines entropy in three categories: (1) physical: “a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system” (2) figurative: “lack of order or predictability, gradual decline into disorder” (3) information statistical: “a logarithmic measure of the rate of transfer of information in a particular message or language”.
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