The international effort to rebuild Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake failed, and Joos sets out both why it failed and what Haitians built instead. Alongside the shortcomings of foreign aid, the book documents Haitian-led reconstruction and Haitian economic practice.

Its frame treats urban planning as a form of violence, and from there examines how residents actually use the cityscape and how the countryside has been urbanized. Read together, these show that the development promoted by international agencies makes impermanence and instability into standing conditions. Ordinary Haitians, meanwhile, put the city to their own uses and remake it, producing spaces of belonging and forms of citizenship that draw on a long record of resistance to extractive economies.

Joos moves between the leftovers of failed industrial ventures in the provinces and the streets, rubble, and houses of the capital, thinking about what dwelling can mean in a landscape after disaster.