On November 3, 2012, a group of pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) members from Diyarbakır jumped over a police barricade and broke into the garden of the Governor’s office. Despite their demands to speak with the governor when they reached the gates of his office, the seven Parliament members of the pro-Kurdish party, along with the pro-Kurdish party’s mayor of Diyarbakır, were rejected by the governor on the grounds they failed to make an appointment. The gates of the building remained locked. Pounding on the doors of the governor’s building, Parliament member said, “If he does not open the door, this door will be broken. He should open the door and confront us. Only elected representatives are here. There is no need for an appointment; here are the parliament members of Diyarbakır.” The incident marks the conflict and duality of this administrative system in Turkey. In this paper, I analyze the conflict between the governorship and the pro-Kurdish municipalities, and through case studies, I demonstrate how the pro-Kurdish party turned this condition of contestation into another opportunity for Kurdish mobilization in the city. With a focus on four Kurdish cities—Diyarbakır, Batman, Hakkari, and Şırnak—this paper critically analyzes the following questions: How did pro-Kurdish municipalities appropriate urban space to transmit a narrative that challenged the State’s discourse on security, violence, and identity? How did pro-Kurdish elements establish an articulating logic to create a collective sense of Kurdish nationhood in the city despite diverse forms of coercion such as arrests of mayors, municipality officers, local authors, and activists; banning park names; and prohibiting festivals and workshops? How did pro-Kurdish municipalities creatively turn this condition of coercion into another opportunity for the mobilization of Kurds the strengthening of their popular base in the city? Based on more than twelve months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork in Turkey, the paper provides a rich account of contested forms of local governance in Kurdish cities as well as spatial settings of Kurdish nationhood.