Cities are now on the front line of dangers associated with the climate crisis, health emergencies, uncontrolled artificial intelligence, escalating warfare, growing authoritarianism and capitalist profligacy. This is especially so for their unprotected populations who, in large numbers, now face a dire future of precarity as powerful elites seek to turn urban assets to their advantage in confronting an uncertain future. For the vast majority of people living in cities, the future is one of foreclosure – a future of dispossession and impoverishment that is lacking a horizon of hope.

What pathways remain open for cities to avert a future of foreclosure for people leading modest lives in modest neighbourhoods? To answer this question, this book looks to the popular practices and knowledges that exist within urban communities and neighbourhoods, finding within them elements that are potentially reparative and curative. Here the engagement with time is different, involving repertoires of horizontal relations, affinities of place and restive knowledge capable of making something out of nothing, of bending adversity towards other goals. Here, rich yet neglected ecologies of urban inhabitation – with all their wiles and improvisations – emerge as the ground of future-making. The book offers a body of concepts to encapsulate this threatened yet resistant urbanism, exemplifies its workings in the streets of Kinshasa, Lagos, Mexico City and Naples, and outlines an infrastructural and aesthetic politics to bring out its potential, thereby enabling another future to shine through urban foreclosure.

Ash Amin is Emeritus 1931 Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Christ's College.

AbdouMaliq Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow Emeritus at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield.

Daniel E. Agbiboa is John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies, at Harvard University.

Julie-Anne Boudreau is Senior Researcher at the Instituto de Geografia of the Universidad nacional autonoma de Mexico (UNAM).

Filip De Boeck is Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leuven.

Enrica Morlicchio is Professor of Economic Sociology at the Federico II University of Naples.