Entropy and Cities: A Bibliographic Analysis towards More Circular and Sustainable Urban Environments

Abstract

Cities are critical to a sustainable future for our planet; still, the construction and operation of cities rely on intensive resource and energy use and transformation, leading to the generation of waste, effluents, and pollution, representing negative externalities outside and inside the city. Within every process, transformation implies the use of energy and the increase of entropy. In an urban system, the transformation of energy and materials will trigger the creation of entropic landscapes, mainly in the informal city and in unguarded natural landscapes, even hundreds of kilometers away, which generates substantial economic, social, and environmental impacts. In this sense, cities are significant contributors to the environmental crisis. Upstream, degradation of landscapes and ecosystems is frequent. Cities’ externalities and exogenous consumptions are directly linked with entropy and entropic landscapes, which are recognized as pollution (in the air, water, and land) or waste and in the degradation of natural ecosystems and communities. Through a systematic review of existing literature, this paper first outlines briefly how entropy has been applied in different disciplines and then focuses on presenting recent developments of how entropy has been defined, used, and characterized in urban studies concerning sustainability in cities and architecture, and presents a definition of the concept in relation to urban systems and key aspects to consider.

Smart Circular Cities: Governing the Relationality, Spatiality, and Digitality in the Promotion of Circular Economy in an Urban Region

“…Even if cities are ontologically different from living organisms, they are nevertheless self-organizing dissipative structures, which import and export energy and matter across their boundaries. Their outputs and outcomes vary due to irreversible internal processes, referred to as dissipation [35][36][37][38][39][40]. Rees [34] points out that "[c]ities, however (indeed, the entire human enterprise), are open, growing, dependent subsystems of the materially closed, nongrowing finite ecosphere" (p. 252).…”