Through a study of Muhammad Mufid Bafqi’s 17th-century, local history of Yazd, Jami’-i Mufidi, this paper explores commemorative writing as a major feature of local, urban, historiography in the early modern Persianate world. I explore the ways in which inhabitants of Yazd conceptualized the connection between their hometown’s physical spaces and the communities (contemporary and past) who populated them. Further, for Yazdis, these sites possessed a certain temporal quality, for they indexed knowledge of the past in the form of oral narratives of illustrious predecessors who had founded or frequented these places. Following Henri Lefebvre’s thought, which posits that space is produced through social practice, I regard the act of commemorating the city’s past as a key practice through which the social and the spatial elements of the city came into being simultaneously, as a single phenomenon. Ultimately, in giving rise to an imagined “community-dwelling,” these “acts of memory” consequently also gave shape to a particular local sensibility among the city’s residents, a particularly Yazdi strategy of orientating in space and time. In the course of his remembrance of Yazd, Mufid not only presents descriptions of the city’s spaces and legendary benefactors; as an integral part of these representations, he carefully describes local commemorative practices themselves, urban rituals that both perpetuated the rhythm of contemporary life in his city and fused urban spaces with their history. These commemorative acts were essentially rituals of visitation: inhabitants regularly visited sites around the city, such as tombs, mosques, orchards, and cisterns, which had been charged with traces of the great benefactors of the past. There, visitors would perform acts of devotion and then consume the benefits these places afforded—blessings, fruits, fresh water, beauty. Meanwhile, the presence of epigraphic signs, and orators would help prompt visitors’ recollection of these places’ histories. Visits were successful exchanges only when spaces had the power to evoke stories about their founders and benefactors; for the wellbeing of the city depended on the capacity for its inhabitants to make present the benefits and stories of the past. In this regard, Mufid’s tour of the city’s spaces, which he composed from Hindustan, functions much like the commemorative visitations he describes. This paper explores the interplay between commemorative social practices themselves and the author’s literary representation of them with an eye to understanding the role of narrative practices in the welfare of the city.