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18 - Cities and Entropy: Assessing Urban Sustainability as a Problem of Coordination

from Part IV - Focal Points of Urban Sustainability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2020

By
Vinicius M. Netto ,
João Meirelles  and
Fabiano L. Ribeiro
Edited by
Claudia R. Binder ,
Romano Wyss  and
Emanuele Massaro
Claudia R. Binder
Affiliation:
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Romano Wyss
Affiliation:
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Emanuele Massaro
Affiliation:
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
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Summary

Assessing urban sustainability is a crucial step towards solving the challenges we face today. Solutions to these challenges are likely to demand new and impressive levels of coordination: people will need to change their habits and learn to focus their actions in specific sustainable directions. The deeper nature of such challenges may be clarified through a classic concept from information theory and thermodynamics: entropy, both a measure of probability in the face of uncertainty and a measure of disorder. Arguing that the problem of entropy may throw light on issues of sustainability in social and urban systems, we propose in this chapter that sustainability can be stimulated by cities that enable us to coordinate better, reducing the entropy triggered by uncertainties and the unintended consequences of our actions. Investigating the role of cities in social entropy through a new agent-based model (ABM), we show that cities may play a crucial role in our conscious and unconscious efforts to cooperate.

Keywords

sustainabilityentropycoordinationcitiesinformation
Type
Chapter
Information
Sustainability Assessment of Urban Systems , pp. 438 - 459
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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