While New Zealand historians have explored relationships between people and their material worlds in wilderness and rural areas, relatively little work has been done on urban environments. "Shifting Grounds" enters the landscapes of the country's largest city, builds on existing scholarship on cultural and environmental history and extends the discussion into areas that have received relatively little attention. In the course of creating a fine-grained analysis of each site, it forges new historical connections across Auckland as well as nationally and internationally that are hard to see and understand in more generalised accounts of the city.