Since rereading Christopher Alexander’s A City is Not a Tree a couple of weeks ago, I am noticing semilattices wherever I feel life.
I’ve long suspected that chaos is not lack of order, but too many simultaneous orders.
Artificiality, though, is paucity of order.
Alexander explains how in the golden mean between chaos and artificiality, lives the semilattice, the trellis of natural order.
The semilattice is the overlaying of a multiplicity of actual pluricentric orders, unfolding polycentrically into a shared reality.
So many things are not a tree.
A city is not a tree.
A service is not a tree.
An organization is not a tree, if it wishes to live and to matter to its members.
Leigh Star’s map is not a tree.
History is not a tree. No event speaks univocally as it unfolds, or even after it unfolds, because history’s unfolding never ends: all history belongs to an unfolding present.
A text is not a tree, nor is a religion.