Sally Blagg

Sally Blagg is an American urban design firm, working in partnership with municipal governments and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to create communities that support sustainable growth and economic development. Our design work is guided by an in-house network of subject matter experts from the fields of post-colonial urban history, aquatic ecosystems, critical ethnography, landscape architecture, carbon farming, and more. Clients are invested in our process of building interdisciplinary teams of experts to explore solutions to structural challenges within built environments to ultimately rebuild sustainable ecosystems across the Americas.

Our curated team of subject matter experts utilizes critical studies of cultural customs as a tool to ensure sustainable outcomes for project partners as well as the people actively living, working, and spending leisure time in the built environments we serve. Sally Blagg’s expertise is either contracted from the communities where we work, or project contractors are asked to take residence in those communities we serve.

Our design ethos in the American market is guided by a foundational understanding of the pre-colonial relationships between indigenous people and the natural world. The work of our design teams is guided by the tradition of American southeastern tribes like the Asara.  Through a combination of controlled burning and clearing, the Asara laid out a “heterogeneous mosaic” of patches in various stages of ecological succession to create food forests for their communities in lieu of Mayan and Aztec agricultural influence. Their mountain culture existed outside the trade lines of the eastern agricultural complex for centuries. We see this as a model design that prioritizes the preservation of cultural landscapes over the potential for profits from industrial commercial exchange. We believe this is the future of American architecture and urban design.

Since November 2016, the firm began work towards building a regional office in the Historic Germantown section of the World Heritage City of Philadelphia (Pennsylvania). Sally Blagg’s pro-bono work in under-resourced areas of Philadelphia is centered around individual families having access to the resources and relationships they need to reclaim their narratives. We believe communities that see themselves as valuable assets in the stories about urban environmental change are more likely to become engaged in the partnership design process of urban and regional planning. Through the efforts of our principal curator, his mother and grandmother(s) before him, Sally Blagg has taken a hands-on approach to studying the emigration of tribal cultures from ancestral lands to industrial cities. Our work has provided guidance for municipal governments, institutions, and individual business communities. Sally Blagg also provides pro bono work for institutions and municipalities experiencing financial hardships.