Around 1900, a socio-political action emerged in urban planning and architecture that aimed to influence social conditions through aesthetics. The goal of urban space design was the "reformation of people" (Adolf Weber). This approach is at the center of the present work. From an educational science perspective, it examines the morally charged debates surrounding social urban development and its materializations, with a particular focus on the city of Zurich. It narrates the history of an education that involved shaping the city as a school of society. The credo of municipal authorities was to lead the working class to bourgeois conditions through the mass provision of specific housing forms, such as settlement construction, and through an architectural aesthetic oriented towards local values.