Research

How can we leverage an architectural history “from below” to rescript an equitable urban future? In Domino in the Longue Durée: Racial Capitalism and the Urban Question, I argue that urban industrial spaces such as the factory were predicated on geographic contests and struggles for power on the plantation. I use the Domino Sugar Refinery, a prominent, historical landmark, as a site to think through these relationships. The histories of the factory and the plantation are intimately entangled, even when they are thousands of miles apart. Historically and now, urban spaces are not delimited by formal boundaries like the city limits or county lines; they are the product of social, economic, and political dynamics and struggles occurring at multiple scales. What I term a “spatial dialogue” structures the transnational sequence of production through the architectural and landscape design of the factory and on the plantation. This spatial dialogue, in turn, was shaped and challenged by enslaved workers who engaged with the topography of the plantation in creative, subversive, and sometimes contradictory ways. This book project translates a set of core geographic concepts for a multidisciplinary audience to better understand how the urban built environment can be “read” like a text that documents the complex and often invisible relationships that produce and shape urban space.