Publisher's Synopsis
MARKET FRACTALS
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This work offers an unprecedented synthesis of cultural economic geography, fractal urbanism, retail morphology, global consumption patterns, micro-market analysis, ethnography of markets, emergent commerce networks, spatial economic systems, vernacular retail systems, and the fractal logics underlying informal economies worldwide. It emerges from over a decade of transnational field observation and scholarly reflection, culminating in the coining and elaboration of the concept of market fractals - the self-repeating, scale-transcending patterns of commercial life that unfold across local, regional, national, and planetary spaces.
While fractal mathematics has long been applied to the analysis of natural systems (Mandelbrot 1982), urban patterns (Batty 2005), and network geometries, its integration into the study of cultural commerce, informal economies, and global retail logics has remained embryonic at best. This book, Market Fractals, establishes this missing link by meticulously mapping how markets, in all their culturally specific variations, conform to recursive geometries that are at once local and planetary, intimate and vast, improvised and systematically predictable.
At its core, the book contends that market formations across civilizations are neither random nor merely functional: they are cultural signatures encoded in space, marked by self-similarity at multiple scales. Whether one walks through the sari-sari-dense back alleys of the Philippines, the bakery-laced streets of Morocco, the hawker-clustered arteries of Lagos, or the franchise-saturated strip malls of suburban America, one encounters repeatable patterns of density, co-location, specialization, and adaptive resilience - each constituting what the author terms a mercantile subspecies. These subspecies, when analyzed fractally, reveal predictable logics of arrangement that both reflect and shape the socio-economic, political, and spiritual life of the societies they inhabit.
The manuscript unfolds across seven meticulously structured parts, advancing from foundational theory to applied statecraft, anchored in rigorous interdisciplinarity and enriched by original field observations, case studies, and conceptual innovations.
