Payton began with a narrow question, why Port-au-Prince's buildings failed so completely in 2010, and ended with a history of how the city was made. Taking the capital's explosive growth after 1950 as her point of departure, she reads its geographic and material forms as expressions of the same processes that underpinned the Duvalier regime between 1957 and 1986.

Some of the evidence is explicit, such as the politics behind the airport's construction and the ideological meaning invested in it. Some is oblique: elite neighborhoods raised over fragile aquifers in the 1970s reveal a deliberate environmental neglect that kept powerful interests satisfied.

Working from historical maps, archival and printed sources, oral histories collected from earthquake survivors and her own years living in the city, she treats slum clearance, transport infrastructure and the politics of cement as ways into the dictatorship's logic and its international setting, and into what she calls its infrastructures of corruption.