By complexity I mean interacting multiplicities. This involves both structural complexity in the grammar and architecture of a place, and lived complexity in one's interactions with the place.

Here are some questions for locating structural complexity. Although these aspects can vary independently of one another, each will tend to reinforce the others.

• Is the place totally foreground, or does it interweave foreground emphases and more banal, everyday, stretches?

• Are the place's normative trajectories of action linear or not?

• Are these trajectories parallel or loosely connected, or are they interwoven and interacting with one another?

• Does the place embody just a single straightforward role and norms, or multiple aspects and multiple interacting roles?

• If the forms of life and social roles involved in the place are multiple (whether thick or thin), how does the place define them to be together? Do they intersect or do they just run in parallel?

• Does the place have explicit links to or signs of its insertion into larger contexts and processes?

(This notion of complexity is not the same as in recent "complexity theory.")

Index
Complexity outline

(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001