Istanbul’s material and social geography in the early twentieth century was significantly transformed by improvements in public transportation such as extending tramways and the ferryboat service. Transportation facilitated urban integration by linking distant places, and enabled new spatializations of class and ethnicity that overlaid historical geographies of difference in this cosmopolitan city. As an element of urban planning, transportation had symbolic value; modernist urban plans articulated secular, nationalist desires to realize a modern nation. To date, however, scholarship in Middle East Studies has not fully explored the culture of urban movement and the politics of mobility. How is mobility embodied, and what expectations or assumptions inform experiences of mobility? How is mobility inflected by imagined cultural geographies – understandings of people and place - specific to particular cities? This paper brings a critical mobilities paradigm to examining representations of transportation infrastructure and of urban mobility as an experience. I study humorous representations of urban life in satirical newspapers published in Istanbul between 1923-1940 (the long nationalist era) to examine “constellations of mobility”. As Tim Cresswell argues, such constellations combine the fact of physical movement getting from one place to another; the representations of movement that give it shared meaning; and, finally, the experienced and embodied practice of movement. Because public transportation brought diverse people of the city more frequently into contact with one another, the spatial integration of movement across the city demanded a continual retracing of imagined cultural boundaries through normative, regulated urban interaction. Spaces of mobility posed a cultural problem: increasing contact among diverse people required the spatial norms to regulate proper behavior and provide a sense of cultural order amidst a chaotic social and political environment. Satire was an important cultural medium for reproducing urban norms, and Turkish satirical representations of transportation in the nationalist era were woven through with Turkish nationalist ethnic, classed, and gendered discourses as they touched ground in Istanbul. For example, representations of encounters on ferryboats to Kadıköy produce an understanding of that place as an ethnic minority area, and of the attractive modern women, politically traitorous Greek men, and amusing Armenian people there. Boats on the Golden Horn, by contrast, carry poor, traditional Turks. Tramways in Beyoğlu are chaotic, and illuminate the corruption and failures of the municipality. Read together, Turkish satirical representations of urban transportation reveal a deep ambivalence regarding the ethnic and geographic dimensions of national and social modernity.