This paper examines the relationship between the transforming spatial materiality of the city’s built environment and the evolution of property rights in Istanbul. Seeing the city as an environment where geopolitical strategy, infrastructural orientation, affective experience and everyday logistics intertwine, the paper argues that it is the spatial materiality of that environment that produces the politics through which property rights regimes evolve rather than inter-group conflict. In doing so, the paper seeks to challenge arguments in political science that treat the city and its “property” as inert and fungible resources in a redistributive struggle between class coalitions seeking to transform property rights regimes in their favor. Drawing on Istanbul’s evolving property regimes since the inception of the Republic, the paper brings that environment to life in rethinking how property rights evolve. More specifically, the paper examines how a) the changing geopolitical position of Istanbul in the aftermath of WWI; b) the transformation of its infrastructural orientation from imperial center to regional industrial hub to outward-facing global city; c) the affective experience of the city and especially the politics of hüzün or melancholy in Istanbul; and d) the physical materiality of the city’s built environment (decay, aesthetics, everyday logistics) come together to produce Istanbul as an environment, and the topography of “property” over which classes struggle in the city. Ultimately the paper argues for seeing “class” itself as manufactured through spatial material experience in the city. The paper reads historical secondary source materials through the lens of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Turkey since 2012 and various literary texts and audio-visual sources to bring together geopolitics, infrastructure, affect and everyday logistics in analyzing the spatial materiality of Istanbul as an environment.