Recently the term complexity has become important for theories of self-adaptive and self-organizing systems. The systems they study involve many actual parts on many levels interacting in multiple ways that produce self-organizing emergent properties. My use of the term complex does not have these implications, since complex places in my sense do not need to develop emergent global properties.
Like those theorists, though, I mean complex to be more than complicated. Things that are complicated have many parts intricately organized. A place that is complex does not have to be spatially complicated.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001