  We propose a route towards creating a metamaterial that behaves as a photonic
Chern insulator, through homogenization of an array of gyromagnetic cylinders.
We show that such an array can exhibit non-trivial topological effects,
including topologically non-trivial band gaps and one-way edge states, when it
can be homogenized to an effective medium model that has the Berry curvature
strongly peaked at the wavevector k=0. The non-trivial band topology depends
only on the parameters of the cylinders and the cylinders' density, and can be
realized in a wide variety of different lattices including periodic,
quasi-periodic and random lattices. Our system provides a platform to explore
the interplay between disorder and topology and also opens a route towards
synthesis of topological meta-materials based on the self-assembly approach.
