The old woman knocks on the neighbor’s door. She needs two eggs to make her signature walnut cake, so she asks if she can give her some. She promises that she will bring her a big slice when the cake is ready. Meanwhile, a mother and her daughter walk down the staircases. This scene and others are part of “TOKI Cinema: Scenes of everyday life from the vertical Mahalle”. Mahalle—the street and neighbourhood life of Istanbul’s diminishing self-built communities—poorly matches the TOKI public housing towers its residents are resettled into. How might towers support the relational nature of Mahalle? Urgency for renewing tower communities on urban peripheries remains global. While these communities face similar conditions each community is also culturally specific. The storyboard, for this thesis, provided a representational tool for centering culture and everyday life within Istanbul’s informal settlements. Later, the cinematic imagination became a design tool for proposing new spatial frameworks while keeping TOKI’s residents at the core of the story. Styled as a documentary, this thesis demonstrates one approach for designing through the point of view of a specific community, and making space that expresses that community's identity.