During the summer of 2015, Suriçi, the ancient city center of Diyarbakır, the largest Kurdish city in Northern Kurdistan/southeast Turkey, became the epicenter of urban war between the Turkish state and the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), a Kurdish youth organization allied with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The United Nations documented that military engagements involving heavy weaponry in densely populated areas resulted in numerous casualties, instances of torture, violence against women, mass displacements, disappearances, and the destruction of homes and cultural landmarks. Following the conflict, instead of facilitating the return of residents, the Justice and Development Party (JDP) government prioritized building up the district's tourism potential as a crucial component of its security strategy post-urban warfare. This emphasis on tourism development wasn't new, as the historical city center had been targeted for similar urban development initiatives in previous years, notably during the intermittent peace processes of the 2000s. During this period, the JDP government collaborated with municipalities, led by pro-Kurdish political parties, to enact neoliberal urban development projects aimed at transforming Suriçi into a trade and tourism center. Despite ideological disparities, both parties worked together towards this goal. However, progress was halted abruptly in 2014, and the district descended into urban warfare in 2015. Consequently, this prompts the question: What does explain the collaboration between conflicting parties through and over urban development projects in the context of civil wars? Why do urban development efforts fail despite apparent collaboration between national and local institutions? To answer, I draw on the 11-months-long multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in 2022-2023 encompassing three districts of Diyarbakır, including Suriçi, the buffer zone for the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Diyarbakır Fortress and Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape, as well as Kayapınar and Bağlar. As such, I argue that although the JDP government and Kurdish municipalities collaborated due to their shared economic vision to transform the district into a hub for trade and tourism; expert activists in the city leveraged the heritage value of the place to prevent top-down gentrification projects that targeted spatial and demographic configuration of the place. In doing so, I employ a critical interpretivist approach to discern the mechanisms that produce and (re)shape urban development plans on the ground by paying specific attention to the dynamics of civil war in Northern Kurdistan.