Among the Dogon of the Bandiagara escarpment, the village is conceived as an image of the human body and the cosmos: the men's meeting house (toguna) stands as the head, family compounds as the chest, and shrines and the millstone as the lower body and feet. The arrangement of dwellings, granaries and altars is meant to mirror a creation order in which the cosmic egg, the primordial ancestors and the cardinal points each have their place. The granary itself is read as a model of the world. The scheme was documented by ethnographers but expresses a long indigenous planning logic.
The Dogon plan is a fully worked example of cosmological town-making, where settlement layout encodes a society's model of body, world and creation, expanding the global record of planning thought beyond Eurasia.
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