Exceptional modes of government that regularly violate fundamental rights have been one of the most durable characteristics of the Turkish Republic since its foundation. This chapter examines the governance of massive informal urbanisation that defined Turkey’s modernisation to explore the constitutive role of a different kind of politics of exceptions in the formation of state-society relations. It argues that the state’s use of legal exceptions to property and zoning laws has been central to its capacity to generate popular consent by turning legal transgressions into semi or full property ownership in discretionary, fragmented, and uneven ways. From the vantage point of property law, the Turkish state appears flexible and accommodating in its relations with the popular sectors in gecekondu neighbourhoods. Yet, notwithstanding its utmost importance for urban survival and social mobility, this modality of popular incorporation ultimately has reinforced the republic’s general failure to consolidate a rights-based egalitarian citizenship. The AKP’s politics of urban renewal appeared to mark a discontinuity with these entrenched patterns by undertaking a massive transfer of urban property to growth coalitions. Nevertheless, the surge of grassroots mobilisation in reaction to these projects and the regime’s subsequent attempts to govern these escalating tensions facilitated a new set of negotiations over the distribution of property in continuity with earlier patterns. Therefore, even when urban governance appears increasingly dispossessing, it has continued to maintain its flexibility in accommodating a diverse array of urban interests by relying on exceptions. The evidence for these arguments comes from fieldwork in three neighbourhoods in Istanbul involving semi-structured interviews with officials, activists, and community members; participant observation; and archival research.