Nobody designed this settlement. For want of a better word, it grew. No architects, no plans: just chaos dancing with order and a pattern that repeats itself inside itself.
Nobody designed this settlement. For want of a better word, it grew. No architects, no plans: just chaos dancing with order and a pattern that repeats itself inside itself.
Imagine a tree, and branches, and more branches within branches. Or a mountain: peaks rearing out of peaks.
Or music: rhythms within rhythms, and the swirling balance of sounds that lift us to a feeling of infinity. Except in this case, nobody designed this settlement. Everybody designed it.
It’s a traditional African village and its pattern is called a fractal. Fractals are patterns that repeat themselves at many different scales (like inside of a pineapple) and are therefore self-organising, exactly like you’d imagine a fern to grow outwards.
Built by generations of African people from the bottom up (as opposed to an architect’s top-down style) these designs are, according to Dr Ron Eglash, intentional in the same way Wikipedia is intentional. The whole community made it happen over time on purpose and guess what? It’s better.
Wikipedia is better than Britannica because it does not contain one entry prescribed by an expert, but many entries co-constituted by many knowledgeable people.
It’s more flexible, inclusive and more robust to changing ideas. Fractal designs are exactly the same according to Eglash: they are more balanced than the rigid architecture of Western cityscapes because they can allow more space for social growth, much in the same way as Wikipedia can provide more opportunities for people than Britannica can. Also, fractals are just prettier. And being prettier is important.
Being beautiful allows fractal patterns to challenge colonial ideas that Africans are ‘primitive’ and ‘intuitive’ (where Europeans are developed and rational) because, in essence as well as function, fractals are so damn elegant.
“Fractal geometry reverses the associations that colonialism gave us,” comments Eglash with a smile. But that’s not the only overture of progress: “Fractals are democratic”, he argues, because of their bottom-up design, and effectively so when that democracy is “participatory” in nature.
So the next time you’re in a crowd, notice that although nobody will design the way the crowd moves, everyone will have designed it: if you’re in that crowd, all of you could be making your very own fractal.
Or maybe growing it is the better word.
