Not all superheroes are created equal. Some caped champions—Superman springs to mind—save the world, or even the universe, as part of a routine day’s work. Other masked men work on a humbler scale. Their frame of reference is municipal rather than cosmic. They consider it a good night when they thwart a mugging.

Daredevil is perhaps the pre-eminent urban superhero. Unlike Batman of Gotham or the Flash of Central City or Green Arrow of Star City, Daredevil doesn’t zip around in an imaginary metropolis. Rather, Daredevil leaps from rooftop to rooftop, in a civic space that has a storied real-world history: Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan.

This real-world setting of “Daredevil” gives the series—now available in 13 binge-ready episodes on Netflix—a special resonance. The Hell’s Kitchen of “Daredevil” is a formerly cohesive, white, working-class neighbourhood under pressure from a larger-than-life developer with glamorous redevelopment dreams. The real-life Hell’s Kitchen, has, like much of New York, experienced skyrocketing rents which have priced out the traditional inhabitants—working-class Irish immigrants.

“Daredevil,” adapted from the long-running Marvel comics franchise, is a superhero show about the evils of gentrification—a politically engaged work which is energized by debates about urban inequality. These debates are salient not only in the era of Mayor Bill de Blasio but also have roots deep in the city’s history.

The villain in Daredevil is Wilson Fisk, known as the Kingpin. Half-gangster and half-CEO, Fisk uses his vast resources, licit and illicit, to reshape the gritty Hell’s Kitchen that he remember from his youth, into a swanky locale more suitable for his rich pals, including his gallery-owning girlfriend and a Wall Street bigwig. Arrayed against Fisk is the masked vigilante Daredevil—a lawyer by day who becomes a masked avenger at night, armed with little more than a few extra-sensory powers and some martial arts skills used to beat up on Fisk’s mobster friends—and a ragtag band of strikingly working-class characters: the legal secretary Karen Page, the nurse Claire Temple, the tabloid crime reporter Ben Urich, and a Hispanic immigrant named Elena Cardenas who is being squeezed out of her rent-controlled apartment.