This paper examines the politicization of urban planning and architectural design in Istanbul and Cairo in comparative perspective. Through an analysis of the planning and implementation of six urban rejuvenation projects in historical neighborhoods, the paper examines the entanglement of the seemingly apolitical practice of architectural design in the production of socio-political transformation. The paper relies on a multi-sited ethnography of urban rejuvenation projects funded and planned by an international NGO, private sector entrepreneur and executive state agency in each of Istanbul and Cairo to illuminate the technopolitical dimensions of architectural design in an era of neo-liberalization and globalization. First, I trace how distinct actors work to produce divergent, and often competing, political orders through the techniques of architectural design. Then the paper traces the networks linking various actors funding urban rejuvenation in Cairo and Istanbul to local and international circles of architectural expertise emanating from distinct architectural schools. In the paper I focus especially on the different actors’ work to engineer new communal configurations they see necessary for empowering desired political orders in each neighborhood. I find that different actors justify their architectural practices in terms of empowering distinct “imagined communities” and modes of governance. For example, in Cairo I trace how the international NGO, the Aga Khan Foundation, mobilizes architectural techniques to empower a vision of autonomous communities that self-govern local neighborhoods without relying on the state, while an entrepreneurial venture, the Ismailia Consortium, decided to forego economic profits in planning the rejuvenation of an adjacent neighborhood in order to empower a vision of a unified Egyptian nation that it saw as essential for reviving the now defunct state as the main governing actor. As the actors investing in urban redesign increasingly view the architectural redesign of buildings as performative in producing desired socio-political transformation, I ultimately find that these actors work to justify new rights and privileges that should be accorded to buildings as they perform their newly-found responsibilities. Thus, the paper then ultimately explores the growing construction of new political personhood for the urban built environment in Cairo and Istanbul, and the increasing acceptance of new rights and protections for the city’s buildings and spaces as normal and desirable, even if at the expense of accepted citizen rights struggling to renegotiate that personhood.