The book begins with a short preface, “Unexpected Paths to Mass Housing,” that narrates how the author arrived at an art-centered approach to mass housing during a 2011 residency with the Casablanca art collective La Source du Lion that took her to the marginalized Casablanca neighborhood of Ben M’Sik. In addition, the preface shows the type of reading that the book will perform by analyzing Abdallah Zrika’s poem “Danse de Ben M’Sik” as an entry point to the history and politics of the neighborhood’s built environment. As such, the preface sets up the methodology of the subsequent chapters in which mass housing is always approached through the structures or poetics of artworks that engage it.