This chapter delineates the long-term factors that predisposed Harare’s townships to a diarrhoeal disease outbreak and the short-term factors that precipitated the 2008–09 cholera epidemic. Foundational to my argument is the claim that urban order in the city has always been bound up with strategies of political control and social inequality. Under colonial rule, historically produced segregation and social inequality laid down the underlying physical conditions in the high-density townships – namely poor sanitation facilities, inadequate clean water provision and overcrowded housing – for the potential spread of an epidemic in the high-density areas of the city. These conditions can be traced as far back as the late nineteenth century when Harare was founded as an administrative centre for the white settler regime. They have persisted through the twentieth century and were never adequately rectified by the post-colonial government despite its ostensible attempts to transform urban spaces in the 1980s and 1990s. Finally, the chapter examines how the post-2000 political and economic meltdown triggered an urban crisis that ultimately precipitated the cholera outbreak.