Sustainability and the city: a eureka moment

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts we were warned in the wake of the Trojan horse, and I'm sure there are people who would say the same about high-energy scientists professing to offer a unified field theory of sustainability. But I would encourage you to watch a 51-minute video interview with Geoffrey West, past president of the legendary Santa Fe Institute. For me it was like stumbling on a trove of answers to questions that have been nagging at me for over four decades.

Every time a CEO or politician tells me that the sustainability agenda is too vague, too slippery, I fantasise about pulling out a unified field theory, like Luke Skywalker wielding his light sabre. No such luck to date. Then listening to the West interview a few weeks back I glimpsed the broad outlines of just such a theory, one embracing everything from the smallest cell to the world's largest mega-city.

West begins: "I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on. Between 10 and 15 years ago I started to get interested in the question of whether you can take some of the powerful techniques, ideas, and paradigms developed in physics over into the biological and social sciences."

So far so good, but I recall the bitter hostility that greeted Edward O Wilson's efforts to apply biological and ecological concepts to the social sciences with his giant 1975 book Sociobiology, which I bought and devoured at the time. Still, I suspect that West's thinking won't trigger anything like the same negative reaction – much of the world has moved on.

"It is very clear from the beginning that we will never have a theory of biological and social systems that is like physics" West admits. "Nothing approaching that can possibly be in these other sciences, because they are complex systems."

But he continues: "The remarkable thing in biology that got me excited and has led to all of my present work (which has now gone beyond biology and into social organisations, cities, and companies) is that there was data, quite old and fundamental to all biological processes, about metabolism: here is maybe the most complex physical chemical process possibly in the universe, and when you ask how it is scaled with size across mammals (as an example to keep it simple) you find that there is an extraordinary regularity."

His team discovered "a very simple curve, and that curve has a very simple mathematical formula. It comes out to be a very simple power law. In fact, the power law not only is simple in itself mathematically, but here it has an exponent that is extraordinarily simple. The exponent was very close to the number three-quarters. So this scaling law is truly remarkable. It goes from intracellular up to ecosystems almost 30 orders of magnitude. They're the same phenomenon."

Later on he asks: "Is New York just actually, in some ways, a great big whale? And is Microsoft a great big elephant? Metaphorically we use biological terms, for example the DNA of the company or the ecology of the marketplace. But are those just metaphors or is there some serious substance that we can quantify with those?"

I found the focus on corporations and cities fascinating. "The point to recognize," West suggests, "is that all of the tsunami of problems we're facing, from global warming, the environment, to the questions of financial markets and risk, crime, pollution, disease and so forth, all of them are urban.

They all have their origin in cities. They have become dominant since the Industrial Revolution. Most importantly, they've been with us for the last two or 300 years, and somehow, we've only noticed them in the last 10 or 15 years as if they'd never been here. Why? Because they've been increasing exponentially."

One early result of the research related to the number of gas stations as a function of city size in European cities. "What was discovered was that they behaved sort of like biology. You found that they are scaled beautifully, and it scaled as a power law, and the power law was less than one, indicating an economy of scale. Not surprisingly, the bigger the city, the less gas stations you need per capita. You tell me the size of a city and I'll tell you how many gas stations it has."

But then they also discovered that "every infrastructural quantity you looked at from total length of roadways to the length of electrical lines to the length of gas lines, all the kinds of infrastructural things that are networked throughout a city, scaled in the same way as the number of gas stations. Namely, systematically, as you increase city size. I can tell you, roughly speaking, how many gas stations there are, what is the total length of roads, electrical lines, etc, etc. And it's the same scaling in Europe, the United States, Japan and so on."

As a rule of thumb, the bigger and denser cities become, the more creative they are. But when the team turned the same lens on corporations, they found almost precisely the opposite. The bigger corporations become, the less innovative they are.

I can't wait to see the theory put to the test, both in cities and corporations. Sure, let's beware of Greeks bearing gifts, even if they are dark matter physicists, but remember how much of our science came from that country. Geoffrey West's eureka moment could well ricochet down the ages like the discovery Archimedes made in his bath. Then the focus was on how a body displaced water, whereas now it's on how our civilisation displaces nature – and what we can do about it. Timely.

John Elkington is executive chairman of Volans, co-founder of SustainAbility, a member of the IIRC, blogs, tweets and is a member of the Guardian's sustainable business advisory panel.

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