Exceptional modes of government have been one of the durable characteristics of the Turkish Republic since its foundation. Not only its history has been marked by periodic nationwide or regional emergency decisions under civilian or military governments but the logic of emergency has long shaped the ordinary functioning of its legal-administrative order as well. Consequently, the violent curtailment of civil and political rights by such measures have been formative of the state-society relations and the intermediating citizenship regime that the republic engendered. This paper explores how Turkish state has governed informal urbanization since the 1940s to reveal the constitutive role of a different kind of politics of exceptions in the formation of state-society relations that diverged from the aforementioned “Schmittian” modality. I argue that state’s use of legal exceptions to property and zoning laws from early on has been central to its capacity to generate popular consent for its rule by turning legal transgressions into semi or full property ownership in discretionary, fragmented, and uneven ways. From the vantage point of the property law, Turkish state appears flexible and accommodating in its relations with the popular sectors and produces a mode of power relationship defined more by governmentality than sovereign impositions. Studying governance of urban land, therefore, reveal an under the radar and murkier realm of governmental interventions that distribute resources to ordinary citizens within a modality of exceptions, ultimately detrimental for the development of democratic citizenship. AKP’s politics of urban renewal appeared to mark a discontinuity with these entrenched patterns by redeploying legal politics of enforcement and exceptions for a massive transfer of urban property to urban growth coalitions, commonly justified by the emergency discourse of disaster preventions. Nevertheless, the surge of grassroots mobilization in reaction to these projects opened space for insurgent modes of citizenship and the regime’s subsequent attempts to govern these escalating tensions facilitated new set of negotiations over the distribution of property in continuity with earlier patterns. Therefore, even when urban governance appears increasingly Schmittian in its dispossessing instances, it has continued to maintain its flexibility in accommodating diverse array of urban interests by relying on exceptions. The evidence for these arguments come from fieldwork in three neighborhoods in Istanbul, analysis of legal and policy documents, and semi-structured interviews with officials.