Port-au-Prince is routinely described as a city the Haitian state has abandoned. Beckett turns that description into his object of analysis, naming it anarchic urbanism: a habit of thought that derives a norm of what a city ought to be from a picture of what this one is, inheriting its assumptions from Durkheim and from planning traditions built on Western industrial cities. Governance in the capital, he argues, is not missing but is exercised through withdrawal. His evidence is spatial. Fires in La Saline during the 1960s and 1970s drove thousands into what became Cité Soleil, a relocation accomplished without any plan ever being announced. Bel Air was designated a red zone after the 2004 coup, which licensed military operations and then barred aid from entering, including after the 2010 earthquake, when neighbourhood organisations themselves cremated the bodies, cleared rubble, laid out a camp grid, took a census and petitioned for supplies.