[first draft of a chapter prepared for a tentative edited volume on “place” sponsored by the Center for Humans and Nature; © 2014 David Seamon; revised with added final section, June 14, 2014] Place as Organized Complexity: Understanding and Making Places Holistically David Seamon Department of Architecture Kansas State University Manhattan, Kansas USA www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/ As an environment-behavior researcher in a department of architecture, I have pondered the nature of place for over thirty years. I am interested in what places are, why they are important in human life, and how they might be understood, designed for, and regenerated. I define place as any environmental locus that gathers human experiences, actions, and meanings spatially and temporally. Places range from intimate to regional scale and include such environmental situations as a favorite park bench, a beloved home, a well-liked neighborhood, a town associated with fond memories, or a geographical locale where one has lived her entire life. Experientially, places are multivalent in their constitution and complex in their dynamics. On one hand, places can be liked, cherished, and loved; on the other hand, they can be disliked, distrusted, and feared. For the persons and groups involved, a place can invoke a wide range of supportive, neutral, or undermining actions, meanings, experiences, and events. [1] To better understand why and how places are important in human life, I draw on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, which can be described most simply as the description and interpretation of human experience, particularly its tacit, transparent dimensions usually unnoticed in everyday living. [2] This taken-for-granted nature of daily life to which normally people give little reflective attention is what phenomenologists call the lifeworld (Finlay 2011; Seamon 2013). Phenomenologists are interested in the phenomenon of place because it is a primary contributor to the spatial, environmental, and temporal constitution of any lifeworld, past or present. Human being is always human-being-in-place. [3] As phenomenological philosopher Jeff Malpas explained, what we are as living, thinking, experiencing beings is inseparable from the places in which we live—our lives are saturated by the places, and by the things and other persons intertwined with those places, through which we move, in which our actions are located, and with respect to which we orient and locate ourselves (2001, p. 231). As indicated by Malpas’s concern for the inseparability of people and place, phenomenologists emphasize that place is not a material or geographical environment distinct from the people associated with it but, rather, the indivisible, normally unnoticed phenomenon of person-or- people-experiencing-place. This phenomenon typically incorporates shifting, generative processes via which a place evolves, devolves, or remains more or less the same. Later in this chapter, I delineate one possible way in which these generative processes might be identified phenomenologically. I then consider what this delineation might mean for making and revitalizing real-world places practically.