Run it. Here it is: Johnstown Municipal Gardens A Living Garden, A Working Machine, A New Kind of Civic Infrastructure Bright Meadow Group Every city
Category: Johnstown
Race and Nationality in Johnstown: A Real History Prologue I don’t usually open this heavy, but the rest of this piece needs it. So here
Bright Meadow Group Cernunnos Foundation Finance and Banking Government Johnstown Thought Experiments
Section 8 to Ownership
Summary Johnstown holds two underutilized assets and one persistent problem in close proximity to one another. The assets are a growing inventory of city-acquired distressed
Or: Do You Want to Make More Money Making Your City Better? I’m going to tell you, up front, that I think you’re probably a
A note from the desk, for anyone whose project has gotten stuck in a way the manual didn’t cover. There are specialists in this world.
Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder isn’t the kind of thing that comes from one event. It comes from being hurt over and over, in a place
Bright Meadow Group Design Environmental Government Johnstown Permaculture Science and Research Thought Experiments Uncategorized
Backfill: The Hole That Heals
A BMG Concept Brief on Closing the Reclamation Loop The first three pieces in this series argued that American landfills are inventory, that the cities
Bright Meadow Group Design Energy Environmental Government Johnstown Permaculture Thought Experiments
The Tin Can Was Steel:
A Hidden Inheritance in American Landfills There is a story we tell ourselves about American industrial history that goes something like this: we used to
Bright Meadow Group Design Energy Environmental Government Johnstown Permaculture Science and Research Thought Experiments
Johnstown’s Next Mill:
A Proposal to Turn Closed Industrial Capacity Into the Region’s Material Recovery Sector A BMG Concept Brief Johnstown is a city built to process material
Bright Meadow Group Design Energy Environmental Government Johnstown Science and Research Thought Experiments
Future Mining
The Hundred-Year Inheritance: Why America’s Landfills Are the Next Material Frontier The headlines about landfill capacity want to be a problem. They will be, if
The City of Johnstown’s draft Comprehensive Plan, Forging the Future, landed in February. I’m new here — three blocks outside the city line, close enough
A Blue Ribbon Earning DIY Venue in SW Pennsylvania. So here’s the situation. I’ve landed in Johnstown during what appears to be a quiet stretch
Donald Trump is President again because he had something to sell. Andrew Yang shook the 2020 Democratic primary from a standing start — no political
A Proposal for Johnstown, Pennsylvania Bright Meadow Group is bringing forward a high-leverage opportunity for the City of Johnstown: an attraction that does not exist
Artificial Intelligence Bright Meadow Group Design Energy Environmental Government Johnstown Thought Experiments
The Data Center Dividend
The Alaska Model for the AI Age — And Why Johnstown Is the Pilot Alaska figured something out in 1976 that nobody in the lower
Silas here. Monday morning. Feathers wet. Coffee black. Let’s run it. Jackson Township, Cambria County, Pennsylvania — zoning board hearing tonight at the fire hall
Artificial Intelligence Bright Meadow Group Cernunnos Foundation Culture Design Finance and Banking Government Indianapolis Intellectual Property Johnstown Science and Research Thought Experiments
Why the Future Is Built in Public
For most of human history, ideas were guarded like treasure. Inventors hid notebooks. Companies locked research behind patents. Governments buried plans inside committees. Knowledge moved
A Proposal for a New Tourist Attraction in Johnstown, Pennsylvania Bright Meadow Group Consulting Every city needs something that makes travelers slow down. Something unusual
A Stone Amplifier from the New Deal Era In Roxbury Park, on the western edge of Johnstown’s urban basin, sits one of the most unusual
There is something about civic buildings that has always stopped me in my tracks. I can drive past a strip mall without noticing it. A
Johnstown is a city that wears its engineering in the open. Rivers converge here, railroads thread through the valley, and the infrastructure that keeps the
An Architectural Presence More Than a Historical Footnote Johnstown’s Franklin Street United Methodist Church stands at the corner of Franklin and Locust as a physical
I’ve Talked About Why I Moved Here. Let Me Tell You Why You Should. I’ve written before about why I chose to plant myself in
Bright Meadow Group Cernunnos Foundation Culture Design Government Intellectual Property Johnstown Paleontology Thought Experiments
Build the Libraries Again
Andrew Carnegie understood something that feels almost subversive today: If you accumulate extraordinary wealth from society, you owe society infrastructure, not favors. Andrew Carnegie did
America Needs to Learn How to Build Towns Again I keep seeing the same map online. Red counties.Blue cities.A thousand arguments layered on top of
Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Cambria County Johnstown is not broken.It is under-populated. That distinction matters, because it changes what the problem is—and therefore what the solution can
This house is an example of why Johnstown never fits neatly into one architectural category. Johnstown wasn’t built in one confident burst. It was built,
Bright Meadow Group Cernunnos Foundation Culture Government Johnstown Labor Science and Research Thought Experiments
A note to Johnstown, PA
I left Indianapolis for a lot of reasons. None of them matter. What matters is why I came to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. A few years ago,
Bright Meadow Group Design Environmental Johnstown Permaculture Science and Research Thought Experiments
The Will Allen Model, Extended
A Five-Acre Regenerative Urban Farm for Maximum Food Production This system is built on the core insight demonstrated by Will Allen: Living soil and living
Artificial Intelligence Bright Meadow Group Design Government Johnstown Man Made Permaculture River Refugium Project Science and Research Thought Experiments
A Different Way to Think About Data Centers
A Local Ownership Model for Johnstown and Cambria County (This could work anywhere and should. Also site selection on the image was for convenience. No
The Johnstown Tribune Building Small-City Architecture, the Free Press, and the Quiet Work of Beauty There are buildings that shout, and buildings that hold. This
There are buildings that announce themselves, and there are buildings that hold a city. The First United Methodist Church of Johnstown belongs firmly to the
If you’ve been following the River Refugium Project, the consulting work growing out of it, or the wide scatter of ideas that land on Blue
Bright Meadow Group Design Energy Environmental Government Johnstown Man Made Science and Research Thought Experiments
The Keystone Network
High Speed Rail for Pennsylvania An Incremental, State-Scale High-Speed Rail Framework for the Commonwealth Some ideas feel too big until you shrink them down to
225 Market Street, Johnstown PA There are buildings you pass without noticing, and then there are buildings that quietly insist on being seen. The structure
Artificial Intelligence Bright Meadow Group Cernunnos Foundation Design Environmental Government Johnstown Science and Research Uncategorized
Bright Meadow Group: Observe, Design, Intervene
Making Complex Systems Work Most people learn to work harder, to grind through a problem. Hard work solves immediate problems, but it doesn’t always change
Franklin Street, Johnstown, Pennsylvania It’s tempting—especially if you’ve spent any time around modern infrastructure manuals—to describe the Franklin Street Bridge as a basic bridge. A
St. John Gualbert Cathedral and the Architecture of Flood City One of the great, underappreciated truths about Johnstown is that it is a city told
There is no “Other” in a republican state. There is no idea more corrosive to the republican tradition—nor more hostile to the virtues it claims
At 510 Vine Street in Johnstown, there is a building that does not quite belong to its surroundings—and that is exactly why it matters. In
& Happy Holidays from the Blue Ribbon Team A Christmas Note From All of Us at Cernunnos Foundation & Blue Ribbon Team As the year
If you want to understand Johnstown in one stop—its grief, its grit, and its insistence on being a real city again—you walk to the northeast
“I Am an Edge Species.” People ask me what niche I fill.What role I play.What “space” Bright Meadow Group occupies in the consulting world. Here’s
We’ve been in southwestern Pennsylvania long enough now to have a flurry of places we’ve eaten at, loved, and fully intended to write about. Truth
or is it finding my inner Pennamite I didn’t expect to move to Pennsylvania and find myself admiring its political architecture. I’ve lived in enough
Words and photos by Robb Smith There’s a kind of luck in cloudy light.It softens edges, dulls the glare, and lets details speak for themselves.
Pillar to Post Home Inspectors, Cambria County Some people make their work look easy, even when the clock is stacked against them. Don Cessna of
to the Blue Ribbon Team …and to our new home in beautiful Johnstown, Pennsylvania It feels good to say that out loud — we’re home.After