How Different Is Different? Measuring Diversity

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 in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment 2013-01, Vol.179, p.3
Main Author: Cloete, C E
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Deduction
Entropy
Resilience
Structure-function relationships
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1746-448X
1743-3541
DOI:10.2495/SC130011