This paper demonstrates how urban space offers a key mechanism for political mobilization and resilience, particularly among groups that exhibit characteristics of both political and social movements. This paper illustrates how, in the early 2000s, pro-Kurdish movement, either banned by the state or denied access to Parliament used urban planning to resist state coercion and foster Kurdish nationhood in Turkey.This paper employs ethnographic, spatial, and historical research methods. My ethnographic fieldwork (between 2007 and 2019) in Diyarbakır covers a time of deep conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement, during which the city has undergone dramatic physical, political, and social transformations. For over a decade, I have carried out ethnographic research in Diyarbakır, during which time I conducted over three hundred interviews with mayors, governors, local authors, community leaders, urban planners, architects, artists, activists as well as ordinary citizens from a variety of backgrounds. I demonstrate how architecture and planning can be an innovative resource to mobilize society, articulate political identity, and resist state coercion. It illustrates how spatial interventions of the pro-Kurdish party and urban confrontations at the local level have been instrumental to forming a new politicized Kurdish identity. This paper evinces how fluid conditions of control over urban space—through constantly shifting planning schemes and power relations, land speculations, informal housing practices, and appropriations of public space—allow a variety of actors to contour new political fields and conditions of identification in the city.