The theme for the fourth issue of Harvard GSD's New Geographies (there was a Zero issue) is a simple one—color in cities. Yet the many responses indicate it is a complex issue that hasn't really been addressed that much. As editor Gareth Doherty mentions in his introductory essay, the theme is not about race, color perception, optics, or other areas of color, but "the interrelationships, spatiality, and geographies of color in the built environment"—the physical nature of color. Often I describe how collections in journals and books benefit from varied responses to a theme (a description that might be trite enough to retire), but I think in the case of New Geographies 3 that variety is at the extreme end of the scale—in terms of geography, subject matter and form the diversity is stunning. What is praiseworthy is how the diversity of the contributions becomes the key to issue's success. Each essay (be it an interview with Petra Blaisse or Alan Hess's analysis of color in 1950s suburbia, to choose two examples) is a self-contained response to color in the city, creating a gradient across the issue, a gradient that is reinforced by the two-way, honeysuckle-to-turquoise color shift on the page edges (coincidentally, I think, is the location of Doherty's photo spread of Irish houses in the middle of the book, where the gray page edges let the red and green facades stand out even more). This gradient is echoed on the book's cover, where the table of contents resides, sans page numbers; pagination happens inside, but it's basically unnecessary, as this is a book to be browsed and savored, just like the presence of color in the city it wakes us up to.