This introductory chapter frames the book’s central concern: how governance, sovereignty, and urban life persist when state authority collapses. In Haiti, governance is not absent but recomposed through local practices, informal arrangements, and hybrid forms of authority. The chapter introduces three key concepts—adjusted territorial sovereignty, territorial resilience, and everyday territoriality—as analytical tools to decode the plural governance structures that emerge in fragile urban settings. Rather than interpreting Haiti’s urban crisis as a void, the chapter argues that authority is redistributed among community organizations, churches, armed groups, market syndicates, and neighborhood collectives, all of which negotiate legitimacy and spatial control. This perspective challenges dominant paradigms that reduce fragility to dysfunction, recasting Haiti as a critical site for understanding global transformations in governance under conditions of collapse, uncertainty, and postcolonial marginalization. Grounded in fieldwork, interviews, and case studies across multiple Haitian cities, the introduction situates Haiti’s urban experience within broader debates in critical urban studies and political geography. It highlights how resilience operates as a political capacity for reorganization, sovereignty as relational and situated authority, and planning as negotiation. Haiti’s urban realities, far from exceptional, are presented as harbingers of planetary challenges of governance and justice.