In the introduction to this book, we guide the reader’s focus to the Australian city of Sydney to locate the project on Aboriginal land that has never been ceded. Here we also introduce readers to “Country” and explain how, even in cities, place is connected to Indigenous ways of knowing and recombinant ecologies. These dimensions of place may not be immediately visible to some, but they are essential to the urban resilience of cities facing the disturbance of climate change. The introductory chapter provides a definition of neighbourhood ecologies in reference to debates across social sciences and design studies and a brief overview of the cognate concepts’ origins and applications and the literature that has inspired the book. It also introduces our place-based design research methodology as a way of doing design-adjacent creative ethnographies that are situated and have a positive impact on urban environments.