Author(s)

C. E. Cloete

Abstract

Resilience of a city can be defined as the capacity of the system to experience shocks while retaining essentially the same function, structure, feedbacks and identity without shifting into a different regime. One of the factors that enhances resilience is diversity. It is therefore of particular interest to develop a measure that can compare the diversity of a city before and after a natural or man-made shock, or that can be used to indicate the difference in diversities of different cities. The paper suggests a possible approach to the problem by firstly elaborating on the concept of diversity and the use of an entropy-based measure for the diversity of a system and secondly by proposing a measure for the degree of difference between two diversities. The deduction of the entropy-based measure is general, and therefore in principle applicable to the study of the diversity of cities as well. Keywords: resilience, diversity, difference, entropy, cities.

Keywords

Keywords: resilience, diversity, difference, entropy, cities.