In the years before Hosni Mubarak's overthrow, Cairo experienced a massive building boom, with megaprojects on the city's desert edge alongside the growth of 'informal' communities scattered throughout the Cairo region. This paper focuses on a particular, political aspect of that urban growth: it argues that the form Cairo's growth took - the building and use of physical space, and the political, administrative, social and economic processes that went along with it - provide a way to examine the nature of the regime itself: its political and social imaginaries, how it envisioned what kind of country Egypt was to become and how it could be integrated into global economic flows, and the regime's (often failed) attempts to bring that vision into reality. In examining how government actors interacted with businesses, outside experts, and the many residents of Cairo in order to exert a degree of control over the city's form and future, the paper analyzes the multiple, often contradictory images and realities involved in managing the growth of the Cairo megacity. In this uncertain period after Mubarak's fall, when a new regime is still coalescing (and which may itself be transitional) and when Egypt is likely to suffer from some as-yet-unknown degree of capital flight, the fate of many projects is unknown. The paper will conclude with new field research on post-Mubarak developments in the planning and politics of Cairo's growth.