In 2015, Egyptian general-turned-president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi an- nounced that Cairo – Egypt’s capital for the past millennium – would be replaced by a (still) unnamed location 35 kilometers to the east that is for now being referred to just as “The New Capital”. Over the past year, I have been visiting the still under construction capital and talking to lead people in the project in an attempt to understand what exactly will become of Cairo after the move. The New Capital is being marketed marketed as a Dubai; in an interview, the chairman of the project asked me “wouldn’t you want to live in a Dubai?” Unlike the UAE, Egypt is a country of 100 million people, has a shadow economy and just took out a $12 billion IMF loan that halved the currencys value, came with stipulated subsidy cuts, and income stagnation. The Egyptian government has recently announced “four foundations” for its strategic plan of which the New Capital is a part: strengthening national security, restructuring the public sector, spreading urbanization, and utilizing human capital. Notably absent in this formulation is the historic “sha‘b” or popular masses of Egypt to which legitimacy of the state has been linked, at least theoretically in the past. What does it mean to move the administrative core of the Egyptian state and to empty key squares and neighborhoods in which the revolutionary events were centered, without any reference to the Egyptian masses? In this paper, I explore the question of what it means for a government to plan urban futures without actually thinking of “urban majorities”. I use plans of the new city; interviews conducted with policy makers and civil servants; and my own background having grown up in Cairo, to open up that question. If the future of urban theory should learn from everyday experimentations of urban life, what happens when life is not part of the plan?