This chapter examines the emergence of community self-organization in Haiti’s popular neighborhoods, where state institutions are absent or ineffective, and survival depends on collective ingenuity. Residents mobilize improvisation, solidarity networks, and localized governance arrangements to provide essential services such as water distribution, waste management, and security. These practices often rely on grassroots leaders, religious institutions, and informal brokers who mediate between communities, external NGOs, and fragmented state agencies. While such forms of proximity governance highlight remarkable creativity and resilience, they also underscore structural inequalities: planning frameworks remain technocratic, disconnected from lived realities, and often dismissive of local knowledge. The chapter argues that self-organization is not merely a temporary response to institutional failure but a durable form of urban governance that redefines citizenship and sovereignty from below. However, these initiatives are constrained by limited resources, asymmetrical power relations, and the risk of political manipulation. Ultimately, community self-organization reveals the paradox of Haitian urban governance: the very practices that sustain life in precarious conditions also expose the deep disjuncture between state-centered planning and situated territorial intelligence.