This paper examines the postcolonial construction of citizenship through urban consumption and mobility in Aswan, Egypt, during the Nasser period. Egyptians have since used this construction of citizenship as a claim-making device against the state, during the Sadat era and even in the current uprising against the Mubarak regime. The paper takes as its focus the urban development of Aswan city, rather than that of Cairo and Alexandria, which usually stand for all urban experience in Egypt. Aswan city, previously a remote “security city” or “border city,” changed dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s because of the building of the Aswan High Dam. Aswan city became a site of Cold-War cosmopolitanism and opportunity in the 1960s and attracted a range of domestic and foreign visitors and new residents. Even some of Nasser’s strongest political opponents moved to Aswan to celebrate the dam and its city as a highpoint of nationalist and developmental planning in the early postcolonial period. Although considerable scholarly work exists on the diplomatic, environmental, and labor dimensions of building the High Dam (e.g., Waterbury, 1979; Fahim, 1981; Mitchell, 2002; Bishop, 1997; Mossallam, 2012), the urban history of the town itself remains understudied. The paper begins with historiographical and theoretical discussions about the importance of scholarly focus on provincial cities and debates over the concept of the “frontier.” It argues that consumer goods and retail space, as both material aspects of the urban environment and also of wider circuits of trade/politico-economic processes, helped to construct a new postcolonial citizenship in Egypt. State confidence that the High Dam would raise the popular standard of living created opportunities for some of Aswan’s residents to improve their social status; other residents found their status actually diminished in the growing city. The paper offers evidence for and an analysis of these disparities. More broadly, the paper points to ways in which the development of Cold War and postcolonial cities remains crucially relevant to contemporary Middle Eastern urban experience. The paper’s methodology is historical; its primary sources are press advertisements and articles, published and unpublished government documents, memoirs, literature, and film.