资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Urban sprawl has found widespread attention among scholars, planners, and policy makers. It has been defined and measured in various ways, and there is still no general agreement on how to measure and control urban sprawl and how to prevent its many harmful effects on the natural environment and its negative socio-economic consequences. Entropy has been one of the most often used metrics for the measurement of urban sprawl. However, its suitability in terms of requirements for measuring urban sprawl has not yet been examined systematically. Therefore, our study examines the behavior and suitability of entropy as a measure of urban sprawl by applying it to seven simple model landscapes and six real-world case studies. We also investigate the influence of the choice of the city center and associated translocation of zones and assess entropy with regard to 13 suitability criteria for measures of urban sprawl. Our results show that entropy is, in many cases, not sensitive to important differences between spatial patterns of built-up areas that represent different levels of urban sprawl, e.g., dispersed vs. compact spatial arrangement of built-up areas. In addition, the value of entropy is strongly affected by changes in the choice of zones within a landscape. Finally, entropy does not meet several important suitability criteria for measuring urban sprawl; it only meets 5 out of 13 suitability criteria. We conclude that entropy is not suitable as a measure of urban sprawl. More suitable metrics of urban sprawl are available that should be used instead.