Measures of Feature-Based and Areal Differentiations and their use in City Services

Two types of geographical differentiations are distinguished: feature-based differentiation, in which a selected property assumes values distributed over a particular area, and areal differentiation, in which an area is broken down into weighted segments. The concept of entropy, a measure of the amount of information transmitted, is borrowed from information theory to provide measures of feature-based and areal differentiations. A possible application of these measures of differentiation is suggested in the study and planning of city services.