On the title page of Cemil Topuzlu’s 1937 treatise on the future of Istanbul, the famed medical doctor and two-time Istanbul mayor, announced a grand ambition: “In order to make Istanbul a modern city, it is required that we demolish it and establish it again.” This startling assertion was rooted in a conviction that the city itself was instrumental for ushering Turkey and its people into modernity. Topuzlu was not alone: in the first half of the twentieth century, many journalists, politicians, planners, medical doctors and architects whose careers, like Topuzlu’s, spanned the late Ottoman period and early years of the Turkish Republic, believed that they could generate a healthy, modern citizenry by reconfiguring urban space in ways that would foster proper behaviors. Facing cities plagued by fire, disease, and a general lack of municipal services, a range of figures contributed to lively debates about the purview of local governments regarding issues as diverse as public hygiene, urban aesthetics, civic conduct and historical preservation. By the 1930s, this flurry of reformist discourses would increasingly cohere under the new disciplinary frameworks of “municipalism” (belediyecilik) and “urbanism” (?ehircilik) with their own dedicated experts and practitioners. Drawing from treatises and articles by this varied assortment of thinkers, newspaper debates, academic texts and municipal documents, my paper investigates the ways in which Ottoman and later Turkish cities became objects of expert knowledge through overlapping and sometimes competing visions about urban space and the management of its inhabitants, and the policies that flowed from those visions. Urbanism and municipalism, I will argue, proved to be surprisingly permeable fields of expertise that appealed to morality, aesthetics, political economy and even eugenics in order to bolster municipal authority and reform society. The political consequences of such intellectual production, I will show, were equally far-reaching including the mass expulsion of beggars and dogs from city centers, the strengthening of municipal police powers to penalize the violation of newly established norms of urban conduct, and the coherence of policies about what constituted legitimate urban labor and commerce.