Scholars of ecological and social change have wrestled in recent years with the emergence of a particular kind of place beyond cities and suburbs where urban and rural are “intermingled” or “fused,” a place increasingly referred to as “exurbia.” This introductory chapter to A Comparative Political Ecology of Exurbia outlines the main goals of this book, first by addressing the challenges of studying environmental and social issues related to exurbia and second by offering a qualitative yet comparative empirical approach to the study of exurbia to complement the more quantitative emphasis in existing scholarship on densities and dispersion of residential settlement patterns. The chapters in this book together offer a comparative and political ecological perspective, which is to see exurbia as a landscape produced by shifting global economic conditions. The book focuses on struggles over exurban landscape change in land-use planning and decision-making processes. By comparing exurban transitions and by discussing the similarities and differences between very different exurban landscapes and experiences, we explore exurbanization from a comparative qualitative perspective.