This chapter introduces the book’s research: a comparative analysis of urban governance, housing, and social transformation in the postcolonial border cities of Amritsar (India) and Lahore (Pakistan). Once interconnected within undivided Punjab, the 1947 Partition reconfigured them into peripheral cities, disrupting socio-cultural ties and embedding them in different national development trajectories. Anchored on Access Theory, the research draws on additional conceptual lenses—including assemblages, Evolutionary Governance Theory (EGT), city\scapes, contested heritage, and urban commons—to examine how governance practices, both from above and below, shape residents’ access to housing and services. The study highlights how civil society actors, informal networks, and urban dwellers navigate and contest institutional power in contexts of state retreat or dysfunction. The Amritsar–Lahore tandem offers a unique case for analyzing the (re)production of urban inequalities and exclusions. Serving as an introduction to the subsequent chapters and case studies, this chapter outlines the research background, theoretical framework, methodology, and structure of the book, and its contribution to broader debates on Southern urbanism(s) in urban sociology, conflict and development studies, and planning theory.