A residential neighborhood is technically one thing. House-form buildings are set back from quiet streets that do not have through-traffic. There is a scattering of parks, trees, schools, and a moderate distance to areas with amenities. A traditional urban planner would see a city like this, a palette of color swatches on a grid of black lines of varying thicknesses. 

A residential neighborhood doesn’t feel like a yellow square on a map. A residential neighborhood doesn’t feel like any one thing. A residential neighborhood isn’t made up of any one thing. 

I used to live on a block in Vancouver in an old arts and crafts house that was either built in the late 1910s or early 1920s. On one side was an ugly new build with grey stucco walls and orange-ish stained wood panelling, and on the other, an offensively 80s taupe McMansion with curved glass block corners and an iridescent transom window. There was a shadier tree canopy at the north end of the block than at the south end where my house was. Some people had garden beds bursting with flowers, and other people had low maintenance hedges. Though the block was homogenous in zoning (single family detached houses), it was an entirely heterogenous experience. 

A city is many things, a network of overlapping typologies. Everything is familiar, but nothing is the same. At the small scale, a block is lined with houses, but none of these houses are identical to one another. At the large scale, a city is composed of neighborhoods, but none of these neighborhoods has the same development history. Our cities are diverse places, contradictory and wonderful. Like how painters all start with the same color wheel, they take the same few building blocks (road, sidewalk, tree, streetlamp, etc.) and make something entirely distinct. There’s something beautiful in the stained glass mosaic of urban life.

This is something of a mosaic too. When we put together our Fall Zine Project, we asked ourselves “what is a city?” and got a different answer from everyone. Some of us celebrate the city, some of us approach it cautiously, and others pick it apart to reconstruct it. Shtot Magazine is many things. We hope you enjoy Issue No. 4!