Change is needed in how cities are designed, built, and managed to meet the grand challenges of the twenty-first century. In this book, we invited authors to report on their visions for cities, using a missions-oriented perspective on transformative innovations that support more liveable, sustainable, resilient, inclusive, and just futures. The resulting chapters have proposed a set of distinctive missions, providing what we think can provide the primary focus for future urban research and sustainability efforts. However, the chapters provide a mosaic rather than a single unified vision. To weave them together, this introductory chapter provides a conceptual framework for connecting and operationalising the mission-oriented approach for urban development research as a nexus of imaginaries, missions, pathways, and transformative urban innovations. This allows for orienting and bringing together contributions that represent a forward-looking collection for missions to guide and inform future city-making. In this chapter, we identify the pathways, game changers, and positive tipping points that can reshape future cities. This requires conceiving and activating multiple mission-scale programmes of intervention capable of step-change urban transitions.