A small white pebble, picked up in Turkey, rests in my hand. Two thousand years ago it was part of a devastating force of nature, a tsunami that killed a city. Today, our cities – where most businesses roost – constitute a global tsunami. Researchers predict that by 2030 urban areas will expand by 590,000 square miles – nearly the size of Mongolia – to meet the needs of 1.47 billion new urban dwellers.
"It is likely that these cities are going to be developed in places that are the most biologically diverse," explains Karen Seto, associate professor at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. "They're going to be growing and expanding into forests, biological hotspots, savannas and coastlines – sensitive and vulnerable places."
Meanwhile, the science of cities is exploding. If you haven't already, watch the 51-minute video interview with physicist Geoffrey West, past president of the Santa Fe Institute. His team discovered "a simple power law" that seems to link all forms of life through their metabolisms. Its applications appear to apply from the intracellular level up to ecosystems across almost 30 orders of magnitude.
And it turns out that the law also applies to corporate life-cycles and scaling. West 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?"
The point, West argues, "is that the tsunami of problems we're facing, from global warming to the questions of financial markets and risk, crime, pollution, disease and so forth, all of them… have their origin in cities".
The pebble goes back on the shelf, but not the challenge. We must turn our cities – old and new – into powerful agents of the next, greener industrial revolution, ensuring that people do not cut themselves off from nature in ways damaging to both.
