In 1988, the Greater Amman Comprehensive Development Plan called for construction of the new satellite city of Abu Nuseir. Constructed by the National Housing Corporation, the city consists of 3667 dwelling units in apartment blocks and single-family homes surrounding open spaces bordered by walkways, stairs and breezeways. Priority of purchase was given to middle-income government employees, for whom the project was primarily designed.(1) This bold planning action occurred in the midst of an era of modernization in which planning debates in Jordan, and elsewhere in the world, had shifted from debates about hygiene and the utopian ideals of the garden city, to those of the nature of the modern city, public services, and the role of the state as an agent of social transformation.(2) This paper argues that the newly established arm of the state in Amman, the Greater Municipality, designed and located the Abu Nuseir public housing project in such a way as to dismantle established forms of traditional communities to create a more modern and therefore more easily governable society. Using primary and secondary data, this paper will analyze the dismantling of traditional systems of social organization (particularly those that centered around tribal affiliations) and further, explore why the construction of a housing system outside the established boundaries of kinship was imperative to ensure and maintain first, regime security, and second, the autonomy of the state, and the king by extension. In particular, the paper will rely on present-day interviews with planning officials at the Greater Amman Municipality to provide evidence of the internal failings of the 1980s bureaucratization of Amman, and how, despite decades of effort to dismantle traditional systems of social organization, tribalism remains a reckoning force in planning the city. 1. Abu-Gazzeh, Tawfiq M. 1999. “Housing Layout, Social Interaction, and the Place of Contact in Abu-Nuseir, Jordan.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 19: 47-73. 2. Rabinow, Paul, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 332.