In 2012 the village of Tasneem in the Egyptian Nile Delta governorate of Al-Daqahliya claimed "administrative independence" from the state on the grounds of state neglect of the provision and upkeep of essential infrastructure services. The village youth movement activists cited the absence of a paved road, a school, a mosque, and a medical unit as reasons for their attempted secession from the state. The village citizens in return provided the majority of the infrastructural services themselves, building them with their own expertise from construction labor, and funding through migrant remittances. Tasneem was a new village created in the 1950s, following President Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab socialist land reform and land redistribution state projects. Infrastructure development was a central argument in the state's village creation. Through a focus on infrastructure as state-making, ruination as state-neglect, and reconstruction as citizenship-claiming, this presentation examines how infrastructural development projects became sites of sovereignty-claiming between rural citizens and the state in rural Egypt over the material-built environment.