Complexity is a diagnostic and critical concept that offers leverage on contemporary places, without making totalizing claims or demanding that we distinguish genuine originals from denatured copies. Rather than trying to separate real places from ersatz or commodified places, I speak of complex and simplified places. This compares two different kinds of place unity, not true and false unities. We can also distinguish thick and thin places, and historically dense and diluted places. Where others talk about commodification I want to talk about simplification.

I argue for three basic theses:
(1) A general problem with places today is the replacement of complex identities and places by series of simpler identities and places;
(2) because of their inherent temporality and because of the way expectations and norms involve meanings and contrasts that cannot be controlled, all identities and places, even the simplified, contain seeds of a restorative complexity;
(3) more complex places can support a richer and more self-aware inhabitation that embodies better the conditions that make possible any place.

[Objection!]

Index
Complexity outline

(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001