Little Worlds
(Source: Unsplash.)
“There is pattern within pattern within pattern.”
Gandhi didn’t actually say, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Credit for that goes to Arleen Lorrance, an educator who lives in Scottsdale. The quote dates back to the 1970s, borne out of an especially difficult teaching experience at a troubled Brooklyn high school. After a violent fight between two students, Lorrance and her colleagues created the Love Project, one principle of which was to “be the change you want to see happen.” Lorrance wrote about the school’s subsequent transformation in her 1972 book The Love Project, with excerpts later republished in college textbooks. Lorrance tells the origin story of the quote in this podcast interview; she also talks about what it’s like to be misattributed to one of history’s great spiritual teachers and leaders. No word yet on whether bumper sticker companies plan to issue a recall.
While Gandhi isn’t the source of “Be the change...,” I think it stuck because it sounds like the kind of thing he would say. There is a story—also apocryphal?—about a woman who brought her son to Gandhi. “My son eats too much sugar,” she told Gandhi. “It’s bad for his health. Will you advise him to stop eating it?” The teacher looked for a moment at the mother and son, then told them to come back in two weeks. When they returned, Gandhi said to the boy, “You should stop eating sugar. It’s bad for your health.” The mother was confused: “Why didn’t you say that two weeks ago?” The Mahatma answered, “Because two weeks ago I was eating sugar myself.”
More reliable still is this passage from a 1913 article by Gandhi in the Indian Opinion newspaper: “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change… We need not wait to see what others do.”
The claim that one person can change the world is too platitudinous for me to hear well, while also being undeniably true (see: “Gandhi, Mohandas”). What’s more interesting and just as true is that everyone is changing the world, whether we intend to or not, we can’t help it. World-mirrors, Gandhi called us; fractals, someone might say today, reflecting the whole while forming the whole.
The Mandelbrot set. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
The term “fractal” was coined in 1975 by the maverick mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot to describe shapes that are self-similar at many different scales, with patterns that repeat many times over. Mandelbrot demonstrated that complex structures can arise from the application of simple rules iterated over and over again. Using the latest technology (he worked for IBM), in 1980 he ran a simple equation through a computer millions of times, then plotted the results on a graph, creating a now iconic image: the Mandelbrot set. The image is striking enough when seen from above. What makes it all the more incredible is its fractal quality, the shape of the whole repeating no matter how deep you plunge into the details. (This video from 2017 is based on 750 million iterations of the Mandelbrot set.)
Fractals are found throughout nature. The branching shape of a tree is mirrored in the boughs which are mirrored in the twigs. River networks have fractal properties, as do ice crystals, lightning bolts, fern leaves, clouds, coastlines, nautilus shells, and spiral galaxies. The mountain has the same shape as its boulders, rocks, and sand. Our lungs are fractal structures, which is why they can have a total surface area comparable to a tennis court. Our circulatory system is fractal too, which is how nature packs 60,000 miles of blood vessels into the human body.
Before Mandelbrot, geometry didn’t have a good way of describing shapes that didn’t fit into a tidy Euclidean box. That’s a big deal, because nature doesn’t produce pristine shapes. “Clouds are not spheres,” Mandelbrot wrote in his book The Fractal Geometry of Nature, “mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.” In a 2008 interview, Mandelbrot said, “In the whole of science, the whole of mathematics, smoothness was everything. What I did was to open up roughness for investigation.”
I hope everything I’m saying is right. I’m bad at math (I took Algebra I three years in a row in middle school), but I’m also fascinated by it, especially the esoteric bits. For example, I’ll read any book on zero. And so it was I found myself last week learning everything I could about fractals.
What got me going is a book I’m reading called Emergent Strategy, by the activist and author adrienne maree brown. If emergence is “the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions” (brown’s preferred definition, from Nick Obolensky), then emergent strategy is a strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions. A conventional approach to change-making strives to achieve critical mass—the threshold at which your group has enough members, enough petition signatories, a big enough crowd, to be unignorable and maybe even to win the day. Emergent strategy emphasizes not critical mass but critical connections. “[Emergence] notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies,” writes brown. She says a few pages later, “Emergent strategies are ways for humans to practice complexity and grow the future through relatively simple interactions.”
It hadn’t occurred to me until this week to think of the Strong Towns movement as an emergent, fractal movement. But consider the Strong Towns four-step approach to public investment:
Step 1: Humbly observe where the people around you are struggling.
Step 2: Identify the next smallest thing you can do to address that need.
Step 3: Do that thing. Do it right now.
Step 4: Go back to Step 1.
(Source: Strong Towns.)
This simple “equation,” iterated again and again and again, builds stronger, more complex, more resilient places. And more responsive, too, since instead of solving for x, we’re solving for the real, lived struggles of our neighbors.
Consider, too, the way great cities have been built. What Leon Krier described as “organic expansion through duplication“ is a collection of fractal neighborhoods that work. Each neighborhood functions like its own little town, Chuck Marohn wrote last year, but all connected together. “That is essentially how Paris works. We could start thickening up our cities to work that way as well.”
Finally, consider the various “scales” of strength and resilience. The United States and Canada can only be as strong as their towns and cities. The Suburban Experiment leads, if not always to outright bankruptcy, then to functional insolvency: taxes going up, services going down. So what happens when an entire nation of cities go all-in on the same losing hand? Nothing good, as we’re seeing. Even the bank has its limit; hard choices will have to be made.
Strong countries need strong towns. But let’s go deeper: strong towns need strong neighborhoods. Strong neighborhoods need strong Local Conversations, local groups gathering in their community to put the Strong Towns approach into action. And strong Local Conversations need strong advocates from all walks of life who are trying to embody the principles we often talk about here—humility, a commitment to learning to work together with people across differences, a bias toward incremental action, etc. A Strong Towns advocate may choose walking or biking for transportation a bit more than average, not only to show that it can be done, but to understand what it feels like when they do. They might shop at a local business instead of a national chain. They’re more likely to look beyond the top sheet of the city budget, to see what’s getting obscured in pages 2 and 3 and 4.
What’s exciting is that the Strong Towns movement doesn’t scale down, it scales up. Each level is a kind of demonstration plot of what we hope for the level above. adrienne maree brown describes it as a structural echo that reverberates upward. “What we practice at the small scale,” she says, “sets the pattern for the whole system.”
There’s one other way in which I’ve started to think of the Strong Towns movement as emergent and fractal.
Researcher Hahrie Han has found that the most effective advocacy groups are those that combine mobilizing—rallying a lot of people to take relatively low-lift action (“sign this petition”)—with organizing, which usually involves deeper action, leadership development, and sharing both the workload and the decision-making.
In my opinion, Strong Towns has largely been a mobilizing organization. The way forward described in the 2015 strategic plan involved (1) creating powerful content, (2) sharing the message widely, and (3) nudging people to take action. The goal, because this is what we thought it would take to change the North American development pattern, was to find “a million people who care.” And in many ways we’ve been successful; our content now reaches 2 million people per year.
But I’m more convinced every day that to make the Strong Towns approach the default approach to growth in North America we don’t need a million people who care—or at least not only a million people who care—but 1,000 Local Conversations. (This may sound like a lot, but consider that it is only 16 or 17 in each state and province.) To bring it back to the Emergent Strategy book, a million people who care is a critical mass approach. One thousand Local Conversations, made up of effective advocates who are joining with others to make meaningful change, is the critical connections approach.
The power of this approach isn’t only the work that’s being done in those 1,000 towns, cities, and neighborhoods. It’s also the way that work will echo up and across the whole Strong Towns movement. That’s why telling success stories is so important. It’s also why we as an organization are developing a strategy to connect Local Conversations with one another across distance.
Building a nation of strong towns and cities starts with you and me and with our neighbors. We are microcosms, which literally means “little worlds.”
Little Worlds + Small Bets = What?
You and I, and the whole Strong Towns movement, are creating the answer to this right now, in real time.
It’s Your Time to Lead
The Strong Towns movement is put into action by people like you in places like yours. Help lead the movement by starting a Local Conversation in your town or city. The first step won’t take more than a minute.
John Pattison is the Community Builder for Strong Towns. In this role, he works with advocates in hundreds of communities as they start and lead local Strong Towns groups called Local Conversations. John is the author of two books, most recently Slow Church (IVP), which takes inspiration from Slow Food and the other Slow movements to help faith communities reimagine how they live life together in the neighborhood. He also co-hosts The Membership, a podcast inspired by the life and work of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, writer, and activist. John and his family live in Silverton, Oregon. You can connect with him on Twitter at @johnepattison.
Want to start a Local Conversation, or implement the Strong Towns approach in your community? Email John.