A Metabolic Theory for Everything

A Metabolic Theory for Everything By Bob Grant ARTICLE EXTRAS 1 "It's unfortunate to associate it only with ecology," says Brown. Indeed, metabolic theory has branched from ecology, and its underlying principles and predictions have the potential to serve in a variety of contexts. Urban Planning - This past month in the Harvard Business Review's "Breakthrough Ideas for

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By Bob Grant

ARTICLE EXTRAS
1 "It's unfortunate to associate it only with ecology," says Brown. Indeed, metabolic theory has branched from ecology, and its underlying principles and predictions have the potential to serve in a variety of contexts.

Urban Planning - This past month in the Harvard Business Review's "Breakthrough Ideas for 2007" issue, West wrote about power-law scaling relationships in urban areas. 2 Looking at demographics, infrastructure dimensions, crime rates, intellectual innovation, and rates of disease spread in cities of all sizes around the world, he and his colleagues found that some urban features, including total length of electrical cables, miles of road surface, and number of gas stations, scale with exponents less than one, similar to biological networks such as the vascular and xylem systems. Therefore, as cities' populations double, they should require less than double of these infrastructure features. Some social aspects, however, scale to city ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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