I have written this book to intervene in current debates on urban theory and on the nature of cities. First and foremost, I wanted to counter the one-sided, developmentalist discourse on cities which prevails today with a more comprehensive analysis of the role of cities in capitalism, one that acknowledges that cities’ genius is Janus-faced. Their extraordinary capacity to produce innovation and efficiency does not only help to create prosperity, but it also constitutes the ground on which the development of the weapons of oppression and exploitation that underlie capitalist accumulation is based. Cities not only make people richer, smarter, greener, healthier and happier (cf. Glaeser 2011), as most of today's research (and related policy advice) suggests; they also work as “suction pumps” (Timberlake 1987: 51) that rob millions of people of the fruits of their labour and plunge them into misery. As part of my rebuttal to the “the city has triumphed” notion, I recalled the work of scholars of earlier decades (and even centuries) that reveals, more or less clearly but always recognizably, how the urban properties of agglomeration, inter-city networks, and the built environment have been pressed into service, in different times and in different regions, for the purposes of enriching the few at the expense of the many. The works of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, of John Merrington and Bryan Roberts, of Fernand Braudel and Alejandro Portes and others show that the city has been a medium for capitalist accumulation since the advent of capitalism. And that in all senses, the city drives growth and creates the means of exploitation that underlies it. Cities have been – and continue to be – proactive nodes in production networks, and, simultaneously and for the same reasons, also proactive nodes in the asymmetric relations of the capitalist division of labour. We are currently running the risk of losing such insights. The book is a warning against this danger. “Harnessing urbanization for growth and poverty alleviation” (World Bank 2009b) is misleading advice, in political terms, resulting from an incorrect, because one-sided, analysis of how cities work. Misery does not come from a lack of cities, so it cannot be overcome by urbanization per se (which is not to say that cities and their economies cannot be important in overcoming poverty).