This paper illuminates the confrontation between the moral and ethical force behind heritage preservation as an ‘industry’ and the everyday needs and practices of urban dwellers in Istanbul and Cairo. The main focus of existing scholarship on archeological excavation and heritage preservation in the modern Middle East has focused on the histories/heritage these two fields privilege over others to illuminate struggles and relations between regional human groupings based on ethnicity, religion and class in the wake of the formation of the nation-state (e.g. Abu El-Haj 2001; Mills 2010). In this paper I build on this literature’s insights on the workings of the ‘heritage industry’ to ask not “which histories are being preserved” but “how does the preservation of any heritage as a practice reorder power dynamics and processes of meaning-making in Istanbul and Cairo”. To tackle this question I first examine the historical genealogy of the proliferation and empowerment of what I term the ‘heritage industry’ in the modern Middle East, and the ways in which its ascendancy reorders the city. In particular I focus on the discursive and political-economic dynamics behind the development of a moral force behind the funding and implementation of large-scale heritage preservation projects in the region. I then examine how specific historical preservation projects taking place in contemporary Istanbul and Cairo privilege the preservation of history/heritage over other potential urban planning priorities to redesign contested spaces in the city. In Istanbul I study the heritage preservation projects taking place in the neighborhoods of Fener-Balat and Tarlabaşı and in Cairo I study the projects taking place in Darb El-Ahmar and Gammaliyah neighborhoods. I then rely on ethnographic research I conducted in 2011-2012 in the four neighborhoods to unmask how urban dwellers contest and capitalize upon these heritage preservation projects to empower their vision for everyday life and the place of ‘history’ in their city. I illuminate such urban agency and the assemblage of power in the city through practices including: hiding heritage from interveners, staking claims to historical knowledge, and circulating rumors specific to the lived experience of historical neighborhoods to resist undesirable interventions. In uncovering these agential spatial tactics, I also push scholarship on heritage to move beyond thinking of ‘history’ as defined by the experience of human groupings and emphasize the importance of affective human-nonhuman relations in the making of ‘history’ and meaning in the city.