The introduction unpacks the main arguments of the book and its methodological choices and provides chapter summaries. It examines how redistributive politics are manifesting through nontraditional, subtle, and seemingly depoliticized architectural-cultural-environmental practices of urban design and planning that work through the rationales of markets rather than outside of them in a neoliberal era. It then interrogates how we come to understand and locate the workings of the political when battles over the distribution of a city's resources operate from within the logics of the market. Rather than successfully depoliticizing political (and especially class-based) struggles, neoliberalization displaces the weight of political struggle into contests over intimate and private spaces of the city that are difficult to recuperate as a polity, breeding a festering and fractured political climate. The introduction ends with a discussion of the book's methodological commitment to a multisited and environmentally attuned ethnography rather than a traditional comparative framework.