Between 1947 and 1949, state-sanctioned texts on town planning and housing were produced for New Zealand schools. In these publications, ideals of social democratic citizenship intersect with modernist precepts of planning and design. Analysis of the school texts in the discursive context reveals an aim to encourage future citizens to take an active role, in accordance with new education pedagogy, in shaping the built environment of post-war society. While the relationship between ideas and architecture has been of interest to historians of education, attention has largely focused on the school. This article extends the conversation to reflect on how readers of school texts were encouraged to consider their relationship to the wider built environment and hailed as active citizens within an imagined community of New Zealand's social democracy tasked with shaping its material form.