human-centered environmental design
Our Mission
The Sally Blagg mission is to curate safe spaces in the urban environment for the facilitation of dialogue between urban indigenous families, merchants, artists, artisans and the European institutions that impact their lives. Our pre-design work is uniquely positioned to have dynamic social impact in post war, post industrial, post colonial port cities across the Americas.
Development without Displacement
“It is through a unique critical ethnomusicological approach to community engagement that Sally Blagg has been able to gain the support of a cross section of institutions, organizations, merchants and individuals with more in common than being siloed in a common city.”
Community
Join our community of thought as we explore cultural landscapes.
We work with traditional American healers, medicine women, trauma therapists, urban farmers, artisans and designers to create safe spaces for the restoration of cultural memory.
Preservation
The key to preservation is telling your own story!
Cultural memory correlates almost directly with the idea of personal safety. We encourage the discovery and awareness of personal experiences and environmental factors that help shape our surroundings, culture, and opportunities
Development
Friendraising, fundraising and ideation all work better in partnership. We engage in a trauma-informed urban environmental restoration process that embodies development without displacement.
Improvement of your environmental design through self-awareness
Generations of immense stress and trauma have made way for the normalization of abuse and coercive control tactics; we, at Sally Blagg, believe that biophilic design can serve all American people through grounding them in relationship with themselves, normalizing access to pathways both through and to the natural environment in the city and the countryside. Our ‘postcolonial’ capacity building pre-design process is tailored to address the issues in a trauma informed manner through reimagining urban spaces while advocating for education and public policy changes.
About Us
Since 2008 principal curator David Rose has been convening design teams that live, work and play in post-industrial American port cities. His approach to increasing solutions-oriented media coverage in these areas where he works (beginning with work in the cities of Buffalo, and Brooklyn (NY) as well as the Philadelphia County) borrows from the scholarly fields of critical ethnography, ethnomusicology and pre-contact urban planning. By housing his pre-design efforts amongst urban farmers, artists, veteran families and elder narrative keepers, Rose has been able to work with diverse communities, building diverse teams inside of a cooperative pre-planning process long before speculative land developers raise the necessary funds to begin building. Sally Blagg was created on March 9, 2017 as a biophilic atelier in order to formalize focused investment in local subject matter experts during the pre-design process. We continue to create support for development without displacement efforts after community capacity building work is complete.
Our Vision
Our vision is a society in which subsistence farming families, including rural aboriginal groups, have the support they need to carry on traditions freely and independently. We see a future where spiritual practices can return to the rivers and well maintained cultural landscape sites
We Specialize in
"On the ground” discovery that focuses on understanding the inner workings of a space and solving nuances through design that includes the culture, environment, and people impacted.
Our Impact
Our vision grows out of living and working, for over 50-years, amongst emigrant as well as immigrant communities that continue to travel to cities along the north Atlantic coast in search of economic opportunities. . Our family sees the processing of deep psycho-emotional ‘pain’ as foundational in the work of environmental restoration.
Our Impact
The discovery and awareness of personal experiences and environmental factors that help shape our surroundings, culture, and opportunities
At the intersection of People & Place
The focus on narrative-keeping in the preservation process is essential as it has been the mishandling of first-person narratives throughout history that has led to abuse, coercion, manipulation and the ongoing suppression of BIPOC voices. The idea is that if we commit to the creation of safe species for cultural exchange, for accountability partnership inside of our shared narratives, then we will be better together.
