The city of Cairo contains a number of sites that have been identified and elevated by global discourses about the preservation of cultural history, from the pharaonic era to the period of Islam’s arrival to the material remains of minority histories. These narratives undergird a network of institutional donors, research projects, and circulating experts who excavate, catalog, and restore sites under the auspices of advancing knowledge, through often invisible labor by local experts and managers and with significant investment by the Egyptian state in cultivating tourist dollars. This paper explores the ways in which global expertise and institutional actors working to preserve the antiquities of Fustat intersect with the municipal governance of an adjacent contemporary informal housing area, Ezbet Khairallah. In particular, it focuses on the issues of land tenure and wastewater management as these two overlapping concerns illustrate the formation of new materialities, embodied practices, and imaginaries over the course of the half century of informal housing consolidation in this location. The neighborhood of Ezbet Khairallah is situated on some two square kilometers of land on a rocky plateau south-east of downtown Cairo. The location was set aside in the early 1970s by Presidential decree for the Ma?adi Company for Development and Reconstruction (MCDR) to build a modern, planned suburb. However, this plan was stalled owing to shortage of funds, land tenure advocacy work done by those who later settled on the land as they migrated into the city, and the active opposition of the Ministry of Antiquities due to the proximity to Fustat and Basateen. As Ezbet Khairallah became a densely populated informal housing area, interests from these various parties moved to address the environmental conditions that arose from the excess sewage created there. Through examining the history of land tenure struggles and the recent implementation of wastewater systems in the area, this paper will shed light on how area residents form attachments to and inhabit their material world and imagine possible futures in this location in ways that rework global regimes of antiquity, value and connection to place.