Open Access

ARTICLE

A New Quantitative Entropic Method for Exploring the Urban Sprawl Mechanism: Taking Beijing as an Example

Zhensen Wei¹, Penghui Jiang^1,*, Zhen Chen²

1 College of Public Administration, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, 210095, China
2Linyi City Natural Resources and Planning Bureau, Linyi, 276000, China

* Corresponding Author: Penghui Jiang. Email:

Revue Internationale de Géomatique 2025, 34, 461-485. https://doi.org/10.32604/rig.2025.065814

Received 21 March 2025; Accepted 30 June 2025; Issue published 29 July 2025

Abstract

Urban sprawl affects the sustainable development of the world’s economy and society. Confirming urban sprawl trends and proposing countermeasures have received significant attention. Cities are self-organizing systems with dissipative attributes, and city development is accompanied by urban entropy changes. Urban entropy change reveals the essence of urban sprawl; thus, it can be used to measure urban sprawl and better understand its phenomena. However, the literature on entropy change in urban sprawl research is limited to qualitative descriptions, and no convenient or effective quantitative metrics exist. This study bridges entropy changes and urban form metrics, analyzing the driving forces in Beijing as a demonstration case. The main contributions and results are as follows: (1) A new method was constructed to confirm compact or sprawling urban form development. (2) This research shows that the essence of urban sprawl is urban form distortions in an urban self-organizing system resulting from dominant driving forces. (3) This research also shows that urban development with general sprawl characteristics is accompanied by temporally fine-grained compact urban development, and the empirical results show that the urban development state paradigm was neither sprawl nor compact. In future urban management work, it is necessary to regularly monitor changes in various driving factors to prevent urban entropy increases and formulate or adjust urban development plans based on effective assessments. This study contributes by developing a new universal analysis tool and exploring the urban sprawl mechanism, with potential application scenarios that can be extended to any city or region worldwide.

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Keywords

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Supplementary Material

Supplementary Material File

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