Patrick Sisson - Writer, Journalist, Cultural Documentarian, Music Lover

344 posts by Pat

Bloomberg CityLab August 2020 The coronavirus pandemic has revived interest in the role design has played fighting infectious diseases. Most famously, the trailblazing modern architecture of the early 20th century — open to nature and filled with light and air, as practiced by designers such as Alvar Aalto and Richard Neutra — reflected au courant ideas about health and wellness, especially in […]

CityMonitor September 2020 Modern cities suffer from a parking problem that’s hidden in plain sight: There’s simply too much of it. When we think of the issues cars present, we tend to look at automobiles in motion. But an often overlooked issue is how cities handle cars at rest. Since the invention of the automobile, parking […]

CityMonitor September 2020 To understand the 15-minute city, consider two very different scenes from Paris. In 1976, the film director Claude Lelouch strapped a gyro-stabilised camera to the front of his car and set off on a joyride across Paris. While running through 18 red lights and topping out at 142 miles per hour – […]

GEN Magazine August 2020 It’s a Thursday morning in July at the Jackson County Circuit Court in Kansas City, Missouri and Judge Mary Weir is running one of four landlord-tenant dockets processing housing cases — usually landlords seeking to evict their tenants. These state courtrooms, which typically try cases involving payday lenders and financial companies, […]

AIA Oculus Summer 2020 As our understanding of the machinations and mysteries of coronavirus evolve, one of the pathogen’s striking features is how it targets the weakest among us. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a recovery that doesn’t focus, in large part, on helping these vulnerable populations. The toll of the virus on cities, and […]

AIA Oculus Summer 2020 Of all the places that went quiet during the sudden coronavirus quarantine of New York City, the silent streets and sidewalks may be the most unnerving. More than 6,000 miles of roads, from small side streets to broad boulevards, course through the city’s five boroughs, serving as urban arteries of people, […]

Bloomberg CityLab July 2020 Ellicia Lanier, 39, executive director of Urban Sprouts Child Development Center in University City, Missouri, outside St. Louis, considers herself one of the lucky ones. A Black mother of seven whose interest in early childhood development led her to start a nonprofit early learning center, she’s fought to keep her business afloat […]

Bloomberg CityLab July 2020 The Covid-19 crisis in the U.S. has torn a hole in city budgets, decimating urban economies across the country even as infections continue to roar back and the specter of second-wave lockdowns loom. Las Vegas faces “the most serious fiscal crisis” it’s ever faced. The pandemic is hitting Houston’s finances harder than Hurricane Harvey, […]

GEN July 2020 It pained Lynette Morrow that she was considering leaving Manhattan for the suburbs. But then again, nothing felt like it did before. “It’s not going back to normal,” she told the New York Times. “This is now going to be normal.” Mariam Zadeh, also from Morrow’s neighborhood of Battery Park City, felt […]

CityLab July 2020 Freddie O’Connell remembers when Nashville’s Lower Broadway wasn’t a strip of country music bars frequented by bachelorette parties and tourists for its Instagram-worthy backdrops. The city council member for District 19, who represents the city’s burgeoning downtown, remembers decades ago, when there was a seedy Times Square feel, when adult bookstores lined […]