This opening chapter offers a glimpse into the arguments and narratives that unfold across the book. It examines the socio-ecological unmaking of agrarian life-worlds in the peri-urban frontier of Lahore, Pakistan, where fertile farmland has been rapidly converted into elite housing schemes. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2014 and 2022, it traces how cash for land appears as compensation and opportunity but simultaneously dissolves reciprocal ties, corrodes trust and undermines the moral economies that once sustained village life. The analysis foregrounds both visible disruptions as land acquisition, topsoil mining, ecological degradation, displacement and invisible fractures like the unravelling of kinship, the erosion of safety nets and the fading of collective memory. What emerges is not simply development, but a socio-ecological unmaking, where landscapes are commodified and social worlds rendered precarious. By situating Lahore’s peri-urban expansion within global debates on neoliberal urbanism, forms of dispossession, land grab and political ecology, the chapter shows how development is experienced less as progress than as a political project of uneven ruination. Villagers’ narratives, often dismissed as nostalgia, instead stand as testimonies of critique—records of loss, memory and alternative visions of justice that challenge the logics of commodification. Hence, serving as both an introduction and a conceptual map, it sets the stage for understanding how development, urban expansion and ecological change converge to reshape everyday life on the city’s contested edges.