Blooming Habitats of the Bronzeville Trail Landscape Initiative

Blooming Habitats is a research, storytelling, and media project that explores the ecological life of the Kenwood Line through the rhythms of everyday change. Through the production, filming, and transcription of a series of short interpretive videos, the project documents how seasonality, light, vegetation, and nonhuman life shape lived experience along the Trail.
The work focuses on the subtle yet powerful transformations that occur across time—sunrises and sunsets, shifting shadows, flowering cycles, migrating birds, and changing groundcover—revealing the Trail as a living system rather than a static piece of infrastructure. These moments frame the Trail as both neighborhood space and ecological corridor, where landscape processes are inseparable from daily life.
An isometric aerial visualization situates the Bronzeville Trail within a broader regional system stretching from Lake Michigan to the historic Union Stockyards, emphasizing its dual role as a local asset and a metropolitan cultural spine. The Kenwood Line’s history unfolds through four major phases—construction, elevation, decline, and cultural reanimation—each carried forward by residents, artists, and the evolving landscape itself.
Once a conduit for trains, the corridor now supports living passengers. Birds, pollinators, resilient plants, and people inhabit the embankment across distinct segments, each shaped by its own soil, slope, light, and neighborhood context. Together, these linked habitats form a continuous chain of life, transforming the Kenwood Line from a transportation corridor into an ecological and cultural commons.