Measuring the Street Layout Orientation Entropy of Cities in the Philippines

Abstract. Selected cities in the Philippines follow, to a certain extent, an organized street layout and orientation based on a designed plan including major cities like Manila and Quezon City. However, others cities developed organically on a less organized manner, expanding haphazardly. Being the spatial backbone of these cities, street patterns controls and limits the flow of people, goods, and activities. Measuring entropy, or the state of orderliness or disorderliness, of a street network can assess the difference between a planned and an unplanned city development. Possibly, it can be correlated to the various socioeconomic variables e.g. population, density, income level, poverty level, etc. or environmental variables e.g. night time light data, urban heat, vegetation cover, etc., that characterizes a city.