A complex place is not present all at once as foreground or focal. A simplified place foregrounds its local character.
Disney's Main Street is more intensely local than the streets it is meant to recall. Disney's version condenses and crowds together typical forms and references that in a real town would be separated by stretches of banal everydayness. Disney so foregrounds the archetypes that the forms and symbols cannot recede and shape lives indirectly. They demand to be direct objects of perception, each for itself.
A complex intensity is not just a series of simple intensities, although both are experienced through a sequence of temporal episodes. The moments of a complex temporal sequence relate to one another in other ways than sequentially. Such non-linear or non-serial orderings are present within all experiences, but they can be more or less interwoven, more or less self-reflexive, more or less explicit in the ongoing experience of a place.
Complex identities and places take time to develop and require time for their encounter. The place's norms and expectations are interwoven, including multiple trajectories that may be associated with a building's geometry in unexpected ways, and may intersect and interact in ways that require sensitive judgment. The intensities that develop from this kind of complexity are not immediate bursts of experience; they build up slowly and they occupy the center of attention only sporadically but powerfully.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001