Companion project · Live
Shifting Landscapes
Land Possession/Dispossession and the Creation of Black Urban Ecologies
Immersive interactive documentary — nonlinear, built on the Klynt platform
The inquiry
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.
Central to the project is a foundational conviction: that Black urban communities are not objects of study or passive recipients of historical forces, but sovereign producers of knowledge — architects of place whose intellectual traditions, cultural practices, and lived experiences constitute primary, not supplementary, sources of understanding urban life. The production of culture in opposition to constructed, colonial realities is itself a form of power, and this project takes that power seriously.
It is a nonlinear work — not a film to be watched from beginning to end but a landscape to be moved through, in which each path through the material produces a different experience of the same interconnected argument. The form is a choice that enacts the content: a decolonial inquiry does not proceed in a single authorized direction. It opens outward.
Black urban communities are not objects of study or passive recipients of historical forces. They are sovereign producers of knowledge — architects of place whose intellectual traditions constitute primary, not supplementary, sources of understanding urban life.
Enter the documentary ↗ The companion volume
Source Shifting Landscapes companion document v1 142 pages — a reading guide, research reference, and invitation
Nine parts, three historical excavations
Each one a distinct site of excavation
Together they constitute a single argument: that Black urban communities are sovereign producers of knowledge whose intellectual traditions, cultural practices, and lived experiences are primary sources of understanding American life.
- Historical Parallels: Colonial Rule and the Early Treatment of Native Americans
- Haiti’s Influence and Impact: Shaping the United States and Black Urban Ecologies
- Transitioning from Plantation Ecologies to Black Urban Ecologies
- Part 1 — Foundations of a Black Urban Ecology
- Part 2 — The Struggle for Land and Power
- Part 3 — Contested Ground
- Part 4 — Culture as Resilience
- Part 5 — Belonging and Resistance
- Part 6 — Environmental Justice and Urban Ecology
- Part 7 — Education and Empowerment
- Part 8 — Economic Development and Self-Sufficiency
- Part 9 — The Future of Black Urban Ecology
On the companion document
The companion document is not a substitute for the project. It is a preparation for it and a deepening of it — the immersive experience of moving through the documentary is what the website provides; the document supplies the analytical and historical grounding that makes the full weight of the argument available.
It is organized as a Q&A in two parts — Part One: Excavations, six deep historical analyses; and Part Two: Inside the Work, moving through the project section by section. Additional citations from Deconstructing Design’s own body of work and from community-sourced research will be incorporated in subsequent editions.
Spatial companion