My paper revisits and questions historiographical tropes about the nature of urban life in Cairo in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through a reading of Mikhail Sharubim’s work of amateur history al-Kafi fi tarikh Misr al-qadim wa al-hadith I attempt to present an alternative picture to that traditionally derived from the accounts of Cairo’s most famous planner, Ali Pasha Mubarak. My reading of Sharubim aims to tease out a more richly textured sense of the city in the late nineteenth Century. I look at how social interactions in urban space produced the city as a place of overlapping geographies, both imagined and real. Rather than accept simplistic descriptions of a dual city, this paper looks at how the changing urban landscape and the novel interventions which the state made in urban life created new conflicts that both divided Cairenes and brought them together in new ways. I attempt to show that the state was actively involved and made its presence known in all areas of the city, rather than being exclusively concerned with presenting itself as belonging to the “modern,” newly Europeanized quarters of Cairo. Moreover, the state was concerned with the city not just as an object of governance but as a stage for symbolic representation in which it comfortably presented itself both as an agent of progress and as the upholder of tradition. Against the prevailing image of a divided city, I show that a closer examination of the day-to-day life of the city reveals a deeply interconnected if highly differentiated space. The different parts of Cairo and their inhabitants were linked in the second half of the nineteenth century through new modes of disciplinary governance, threats of epidemic and official concerns with public health, the representational practices of the state and popular mass media. At the same time, different classes of Cairenes were affected differently by these new state practices.