In this paper, I seek to differentiate two separate social spaces in contemporary Cairo – the street space and the road space – and how those spaces shape the understanding of four particular public artworks. In the street space, I investigate the public sculptures of the economist, Ta’alat Harb, by Fathi Mahmoud, and Nahdat Misr [Egypt Awakening] by Muhammad Mukhtar. Both sculptures, installed in their current positions after 1952, represent the careful marking of the urban street space through governmental program. The names of the sculptures, and particularly Ta’alat Harb, become actual destinations of everyday movement. I posit that each sculpture directly interacts with the everyday life of the Cairo pedestrian, continually inscribing the state’s ideology on daily movement. In the road space, I look at the Memorial of the Unknown Soldier and the October War Panorama as fundamentally different social spaces, where the pedestrian must be an active participant in the experience of the monument. Unlike the street space, where the everyday pedestrian confronts sculptures directly and moves around them, the two later works exist only peripherally to the everyday experience. Thus, the participant must actively choose to stop on the road and enter the space, altering his or her mode of reception. Through this comparison of two social spaces, I seek to determine if Michel de Certeau’s hypothesis holds true in the Cairo context. Does the everyday movement of the public interrupt the power structure of the government’s message, or do both spaces preclude dissent?