In preparation · 142 pages in draft

Shifting Landscapes

Companion document to the interactive documentary

The analytical and historical grounding for the Shifting Landscapes documentary: a decolonial inquiry into land, power, policy, culture, and resistance in the creation of Black urban ecologies.

Organized as a Q&A in two parts — Part One: Excavations, six deep historical analyses; Part Two: Inside the Work, moving through the documentary section by section. It can be read straight through, used as a reference, or consulted alongside specific paths through the website.

It is not a substitute for the documentary. It is a preparation for it and a deepening of it: the immersive experience of moving through the nonlinear work is what the website provides, and this supplies the grounding that makes the full weight of the argument available.

What is in it

Part One: Excavations — colonial rule and Indigenous dispossession; Haiti and the structural consequences that shaped America; plantation ecology into Black urban ecology
Part Two: Inside the Work — nine parts, from Foundations of a Black Urban Ecology through The Future of Black Urban Ecology
Intellectual Foundations — the debts the project carries, named explicitly

Source Built from Named intellectual debts across spatial and ecological foundations, epistemology, urban politics, Great Migration and dispossession history, the Black Atlantic, and environmental, carceral and technological dimensions. Additional citations from Deconstructing Design’s own body of work and from community-sourced research are to be incorporated in subsequent editions.

The draft as it stands — not a finished cover.

Can I get it

Not finished yet. This one is still moving — chapters can be added, cut, or rewritten before it is done, so treat the page count above as where the draft stands today, not as a promise.

When it is ready, buying it will not be buying merchandise. Sixty percent of what you put in goes straight into the programs this book came out of — the workshop, the garden bed, the mural, the next piece of research. No profit is distributed, and you can hold us to that.

And if you are already in the Founding Archive, it is yours without buying anything. Knowledge is not a reward for financial capacity.

Put me on the list

Accompanies

Shifting Landscapes

A decolonial inquiry into the interplay between land, power, policy, culture, and resistance in the creation of ecologies of knowledge that continue to transform African American urban environments.

Pillars

Participate

Help make this one true

The documentary this accompanies is built from land, memory, and testimony. If its ground is your ground — if you have watched a landscape shift under your feet — what you know sharpens what we are writing. What holds is incorporated, with credit if you name yourself.

What are you adding?

A memory or story A lived counter-example A correction A source Something else

A memory can live in a place — a yard, a market, a kitchen — or in the body: a smell, a taste, the weight of a full basket. Place is memory; so is smell. Tell it the way you carry it.

What actually happened — on your block, in your family, at your job. A lived counter-example outweighs a tidy theory, and this work would rather be corrected than polished.

Point to what is wrong and say what is right, as you know it. Lived knowledge counts as evidence here — you do not need a citation to be taken seriously.

A book, a paper, an archive, an elder, a grower. People are sources. Tell us where to look and what it will show us.

If it does not fit any box here, it may be the thing we have not thought to ask for. Say it plainly.

Your contribution

Name the record credits its contributors

Email to verify authorship — never published

Reviewed before anything is published, per the data privacy policy. Your name and email are asked for because authorship matters here: a record that cannot be verified cannot be trusted, and a contribution that holds is credited to you by name in future editions. Your email is never published.