Can the complexity of cities really be reduced to a single set of equations, as the physicist Geoffrey West claims, or even 3,000 of them? Is it really true, as West’s numbers would indicate, that Corvallis, Oregon–a city of 55,000 two hours’ drive south of Portland–is the most innovative city in America? Perhaps there’s something in the water, or it may have more to do with the fact that West’s model loves patents and Hewlett Packard’s Advanced Products Division is based there, along with its patent portfolio, one developed by thousands of researchers worldwide.

West’s conclusions are only as good as the data and the models (patents equal innovation) he has to work with. This problem–if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it–combined with the impulse to improve cities by models, is driving both IBM’s “smarter city” strategy and the nascent “urban systems” movement, which seek to apply complexity science to cities. IBM sponsored the first Urban Systems Symposium in May (where West co-starred in a show-stopping discussion with Paul Romer and Stewart Brand) and today announced the latest plank in its smarter city platform: an “app” containing 3,000 equations which collectively seek to model cities’ emergent behavior. IBM also revealed its first customer, the City of Portland, Oregon.

Systems Dynamics for Smarter Cities, as the app is called, tries to quantify the cause-and-effect relationships between seemingly uncorrelated urban phenomena. What’s the connection, for example, between public transit fares and high school graduation rates? Or obesity rates and carbon emissions? To find out, simply round up experts to hash out the linkages, translate them into algorithms, and upload enough historical data to populate the model. Then turn the knobs to see what happens when you nudge the city in one direction.

“While other analytical approaches rely on breaking a problem down into smaller and smaller pieces, the model we’ve created recognizes that the behavior of a system as a whole can be different from what might be anticipated by looking at its parts,” Michael Littlejohn, vice president of strategy for Smarter Cities at IBM, said in this morning’s press release.

IBM pitched Portland in 2009 to assist in the creation of the “Portland Plan,” a 25-year road map for the city and its related government agencies, the first draft of which will be released later this month. The city’s goal was more modest than IBM’s, less a model of everything than a chance to “shine a light on the biggest drivers of change,” according to Joe Zehnder, the city’s chief planner. One of those drivers is the city’s commitment to a 40 percent decrease in carbon emissions by 2030, which necessitates less driving and more walking and biking. Running the model, Zehnder and his fellow planners found that obesity rates fell as the number of cyclists rose, which led to a further increase in biking. This knowledge proved useful both in formulating policy (more bicycle lanes, anyone?) and in creating metrics to measure their success down the road.