A Metabolic Theory for Everything

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...