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Resilience Accelerator for Johnstown
Fall 2019
Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Toward Resilient Cities and Landscape Seminar
Location
Johnstown, PA
City Scale
Critics
Kate Orff, Edwin Thaddeus Pawlowski
Team
Niharika Shekhawat, Yile Xu
Workshop in Johnstown to imagine it as a place for making. Johnstown was imagined as tiles and groups were assigned to workshop different aspects of Johnstown. Creative place making and River arts walk to create a resilient, community oriented creative district serving as a magnet for influx of people and resources were some first steps ideas that came out of this workshop.
Tiles of slices of Johnstown for the workshop catering to different sectors of the city. We were divided into different groups and walked the transects, make notes on plan and section diagrams.
(excerpts from an opinion piece by Thaddeus Pawlowski in the Tribune Democrat, November 22, 2019)
On October 28, Johnstown’s community leaders came together with graduate students and faculty from Columbia University to discuss how to make the area’s infrastructure more resilient. A resilient city is one that can survive shocking events like floods, adapt to ongoing challenges like a more global economy, and thrive today and for generations to come. Often resilience builds up gradually, but when there is an escalating crisis, resilience can be accelerated through coordinated public investments into things like transportation, housing, arts and education, economic development and green infrastructure.
What if all the small cities in Western Pennsylvania could be linked by high-speed regional rail? Hundreds of miles of railroads once linked the region’s small cities. As the economy became more global, manufacturing moved to cheaper labor markets, cars and trucks replaced trains, and the interstate highways bypassed small cities driving jobs and housing away from downtowns, a trend that continues today.
On October 28, Johnstown’s community leaders came together with graduate students and faculty from Columbia University to discuss how to make the area’s infrastructure more resilient. A resilient city is one that can survive shocking events like floods, adapt to ongoing challenges like a more global economy, and thrive today and for generations to come. Often resilience builds up gradually, but when there is an escalating crisis, resilience can be accelerated through coordinated public investments into things like transportation, housing, arts and education, economic development and green infrastructure.
What if all the small cities in Western Pennsylvania could be linked by high-speed regional rail? Hundreds of miles of railroads once linked the region’s small cities. As the economy became more global, manufacturing moved to cheaper labor markets, cars and trucks replaced trains, and the interstate highways bypassed small cities driving jobs and housing away from downtowns, a trend that continues today.
What if the city’s identity could be reborn as a destination for makers and artisans? Anyone visiting the Center for Metal Arts and the Bottleworks can see, Johnstown is a place for makers and doers. Creative place-making and arts programs are not a luxury, but the backbone of a diverse and robust economy. Public support for the arts and arts education should therefore be a national, state, and local priority. Johnstown would be an ideal location to build a college campus that would benefit from this culture of creativity, perhaps a College for Industrial Art and Innovation, supported by a public endowment as were the state land grant universities.
What if former steel mills could be repurposed to build renewable energy infrastructure? Scientists have warned that unless we re-tool our infrastructure and industries to emit significantly less greenhouse gas, the 21st century will see more disasters around the world and close to home, which can harm our economy further.
What if abandoned housing could be refurbished by and for climate refugees? Johnstown makes almost every list of poor cities, but this is misleading. Only 10% of households are in poverty in the greater area, but within the city 30% of households are in poverty. Nationwide the gap between rich and poor steadily widened over the last several decades and the middle class has shrunk. What if deteriorating flood control infrastructure could be rebuilt for the storms of the 21st century as a vast urban forest? Johnstown’s water problems don’t start or end at the river. With increased precipitation, Johnstown will need more storage for water. More grey solutions--tanks and pipes--will be costly to build and maintain, prone to failure, and not provide the added benefits provided by the green alternative: a forest.
What if abandoned housing could be refurbished by and for climate refugees? Johnstown makes almost every list of poor cities, but this is misleading. Only 10% of households are in poverty in the greater area, but within the city 30% of households are in poverty. Nationwide the gap between rich and poor steadily widened over the last several decades and the middle class has shrunk. What if deteriorating flood control infrastructure could be rebuilt for the storms of the 21st century as a vast urban forest? Johnstown’s water problems don’t start or end at the river. With increased precipitation, Johnstown will need more storage for water. More grey solutions--tanks and pipes--will be costly to build and maintain, prone to failure, and not provide the added benefits provided by the green alternative: a forest.
Resilient Infrastructure Futures NYC. Columbia GSAPP and CRCL
workshop at Our Futures Festival NYC, to engage the public in a creative exercise to visualize the innovations needed for carbon-free critical infrastructure. Also exploring how those innovations will work together in order to make NYC more sustainable, resilient and equitable.