The re-privatization and the (re-)opening of Zambia’s mines in the early 2000s produced massive changes in Solwezi town, an urban area in the Northwestern part of the country with a century-long history of intermittent commercial mining. Today, from a bird’s eye view, Solwezi town and the mine are more separated than they ever were in their history: the mine’s premises are gated, and entry is exclusive. These physical separations hide, however, the various entanglements between the town dwellers among themselves and with the mine. The paper describes practices of house- and home-making. Through the lens of the planning and building process, it addresses key aspects of the economy of urban life such as bureaucracy, neighbourliness, division of labour, cooperation, competition, reciprocity, sociality, power, land and interdependence, and how new relationships are being forged. The paper will show how interdependence between residents emerges from the house- and home-making process, producing a specific urban social and built environment and a form of Vergesellschaftung at an extractive frontier.