Deportation Hubs — Investigation Visuals
Seven interactive visuals for a BIRN investigation into the deportation infrastructure assembled across the Western Balkans — three embedded in the published article, two published in full here.
About the project
BIRN's investigation traced how a deportation infrastructure was built across the Western Balkans over two decades — 38 centres, 17,656 places, and the agreements and EU pre-accession money behind them. The reporting arrived as an investigation dataset, a document trail and a set of FOI returns.
This work turned it into visuals a reader can move through rather than an annex they scroll past: a map of the region filling in between 2002 and 2026, a two-decade timeline, a before/after satellite comparator over the Lipa plateau, a continuous reading of the whole investigation as one scroll, and a scroll-driven reconstruction of the Italian-built compound at Gjadër.
The binding constraint was longevity in someone else's hands. Every page is plain static HTML with no build step, no bundler, no framework and no charting library, so the newsroom can host the files unchanged for as long as the story matters, and each visual survives being embedded in a page it does not control.
Balkan Insight published three of the seven. The two hosted here are published by Vaotea, not by BIRN — the reporting and the dataset are theirs, while this presentation of them, and the figures derived from the data here, are ours. BIRN is not responsible for what is shown on these two pages.
Read it
- The investigation on Balkan InsightReporting by Xhorxhina Bami and Marta Moreno Guerrero, with the map, the timeline and the Lipa comparator embedded.
- The journeyThe whole investigation as one continuous scroll — cold open, the region filling up, satellite evidence, the paper trail, the numbers.
- Gjadër in 3DThe Italian-built compound in Albania, reconstructed as a scroll-driven model. Schematic — no official plan has been published.
Impact
- Three of the seven visuals were embedded in Balkan Insight's published investigation.
- Two decades of agreements, centres and EU funding read as one continuous scroll rather than a PDF annex.
- The compound at Gjadër, for which no official plan has ever been published, is reconstructed from satellite and drone imagery and inspection reports, and labelled on screen as schematic.
- Each page is a self-contained static file, so the newsroom can serve it without a build step or a runtime dependency.
Screens
