Thanks to international marketing campaigns and the Gezi Protests in its very heart, Istanbul is now more visible than ever in the global scene. Since the 1980s, it has claimed its reputation as a global city or global city-region re-establishing itself as a regional hub for finance, logistics, tourism, and culture at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. State authorities have promoted Istanbul to attract multinational corporations while also devising policies to maintain the city’s ability to stimulate trade, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurialism. As Istanbul rose to its global city status with solid finance and service sectors, it has relocated inner-city industry to its peripheries, generating new industrial centers on its outskirts. This paper aims to shift the focus of attention from the oft-stressed centrality in studies on global cities and/or city-regions to their peripheries which themselves turned into new centers of industry. As such, the article challenges the dominant anthropomorphizing and reifying epistemologies in urban and regional studies with an idiographic case study: Gebze, a heavily industrialized city in the vicinity of Istanbul. Having received unprecedented rates of labor migrants in the last five decades and being the manufacturing location of Istanbul-based industry, Gebze has defied the notions of an ideal city under the shadow of the polished image of the globalized Istanbul. Arguing that the emergence of city-regions is a process embedded in complex social relations and conflicts around collective provision and consumption of urban services and infrastructures, the article attempts to make a case on peripheral urbanization exemplified by Gebze as the – somewhat invisible yet vital – center of Istanbul-based industry which have complicated the lives of the very producers of this city, i.e. the migrant laborers.