Redignify was born from Journee Harris’ master’s thesis, Redignifying LaVilla: Visualizing and Recentering Black Epistemologies in the Revitalization of LaVilla, Jacksonville, Florida. In her research, Journee identified a critical gap between residents with lived experience and designers with academic and institutional expertise. She introduced “redignification” as a process to bridge this gap—one that validates, materializes, and translates specialized knowledge to create historically and culturally relevant spaces.

Today, Redignify is a cultural preservation practice and consultancy dedicated to centering lived experience and archival research as fundamental sources of knowledge in the design process. We believe that residents and community members are the rightful experts of their spaces, and our work ensures that their stories, values, and histories are not only acknowledged but embedded in the built environment.

About Our Founder

Journee Harris is an urbanist and cultural worker who believes in the power of storytelling as a tool for community engagement, intergenerational connection, and cultural heritage preservation.

A native of Washington, DC, raised in Jacksonville, FL, with deep ties to her mother’s homeland of Jamaica, Journee’s curiosity about what makes a place a “home” shaped her academic and professional journey. Initially trained in community psychology, she transitioned into urban planning in 2020 to further explore the relationships between people, places, and cultural preservation.

Since 2022, she has led participatory archival projects, including Hacking the Archives at MIT and her thesis project, Redignifying LaVilla. Her work centers resident voices, documents local knowledge, and translates community histories into the built environment to help create culturally and historically meaningful spaces.

A graduate of Howard University and MIT, Journee is currently based in Washington, DC, where she leads and grows her preservation practice.