Entropy as a Measure of Attractiveness and Socioeconomic Complexity in Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area.

Maxime Lenormand,Vinícius Da Fonseca Vieira,Júlio César Chaves,Moacyr Alvim Horta Barbosa Da Silva,Horacio Samaniego,Alexandre Gonçalves Evsukoff

doi:10.3390/e22030368

Abstract

Defining and measuring spatial inequalities across the urban environment remains a complex and elusive task which has been facilitated by the increasing availability of large geolocated databases. In this study, we rely on a mobile phone dataset and an entropy-based metric to measure the attractiveness of a location in the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area (Brazil) as the diversity of visitors’ location of residence. The results show that the attractiveness of a given location measured by entropy is an important descriptor of the socioeconomic status of the location, and can thus be used as a proxy for complex socioeconomic indicators.

Highlights

While cities have long been recognized as the cradle of modern civilization by providing a safe place for cultural development, the inequality distribution of wealth and services remain the main pressing issue threatening the sustainability of modern societies
The impact of socio-spatial inequalities on urban systems has largely been treated in the urban economics and sociological literature, but the increasing availability of large mobile phone databases has opened the possibility to provide a clearer picture of how different aspects of urban life impact economic and sociodemographic aspects of cities [19]
We hereby illustrate the potential of combining mobile phone data with entropy-based metrics to measure the attractiveness of a location

Summary

Introduction

While cities have long been recognized as the cradle of modern civilization by providing a safe place for cultural development, the inequality distribution of wealth and services remain the main pressing issue threatening the sustainability of modern societies. Despite the large technological advances making our lives apparently easier, economic inequality has been on the rise worldwide since 1980. This has become such an issue that most recent datasets show that the top 1% of the wealthy population capture twice as much of the global income growth as the bottom 50% [1]. While such distribution disparity among urbanites and social stratification is currently under deep scrutiny among economists, including the spatial components to such descriptions, it imposes additional methodological difficulties given the vagility of human nature and the heterogeneity of the spatial distribution of resources. While some discuss causal factors behind socio-spatial inequalities, evidence coming from natural experiments have shown direct impacts

Methods

Results

Conclusion