There is a paradox at the heart of urban life. On the one hand, cities are among the greatest achievements of human creative expression, with their monumental civic and religious constructions, capacious streets and boulevards, factories and workshops, parks and gardens, intellectual and artistic life, and markets and public spaces buzzing with activity. At the same time, cities comprise one of the major generators of inequality, poverty, racial discrimination, pollution, habitat destruction, climate change, and depletion of the natural world. Together we try to unravel this paradox by examining the entanglement of political and economic life in cities through an interdisciplinary approach grounded in traditions of moral philosophy and critical thought--an approach that has long defined The New School as a space of inquiry. We draw on perspectives from classical economics, Marxism, feminism, the Frankfort School, critical race theory, post-colonial and decolonial thought, and political ecology. We apply these varied perspectives to major issues in public policy, including urbanization, governance, planning, informality, race and space, productive and reproductive labor, urban ecology and metabolism, infrastructure, gentrification, the neoliberal turn, and the making of urban regions. Our goal is to understand how cities are put together (and for whom), how they fall apart (and why), and what futures we can imagine for them.