It is almost a decade since the start of the Arab Uprisings. At the time, the cities of the Arab World became centre stages for rethinking hopeful politics (Butler 2011; Gordillo 2011; Gregory 2013; Harb 2017). These revolutionary cities attracted significant attention to the ways in which local artists and activists were appropriating the public spaces (Tripp 2012, 2013; Abaza 2013). It is, therefore, curious that this academic interest started to wane as the promise that sustained the early years of the decade failed to materialise. This is because the generation of activists, artists and writers that witnessed the revolutionary years, continue to navigate the aftermath of revolutionary hope in their everyday spaces and in their creative practice. Their experience tends to be overlooked, or — at best— understood through the lenses of trauma and despair. Beyond the two images of revolutionary hope and the affective politics of despair, this paper investigates the political aesthetics and poetics deployed by filmmakers and writers to grapple with a world after the revolution. In other words, this paper asks: how do we endure disappointment and maintain attachments to spaces that seem to be perpetually betraying their political promise? Focusing on two films "Villa 69" (2013) and "In the Last Days of the City" (2016), this paper will aim to investigate the role of poetics and aesthetics of space in reckoning with political disappointment. It focuses particularly on the materiality of architectural dilapidation and the desire for preservation and/or documentation of built environment. The aim of this focus is to investigate the ways in which contemporary politics of urban ruination in Cairo are negotiated, challenged or reckoned-with in artistic practice. Theoretically, the paper develops a framework that engages the material space of cities as narrative devices; geopoetics. It will use this framework to uncover alternative practices of storytelling the city as deployed by its inhabitants, writers and artists. As such, it does not only challenge contemporary readings of revolution and affect in the Middle East, but also challenges what is often offered up as a postcolonial critique of orientalist representations of rebellion and the place of the city.