How does a city recuperate a sense of “the public” after civil war? What institutions and imaginaries need to be in place to allow for public co-presence to resume after such trauma to the social body? This paper examines one city block in Oran—Algeria’s second-largest city—that planted the seed for a "public of the future" just as the 1990s civil war, or the Black Decade, began. This inconspicuous street houses three organizations behind unassuming façades: Bel Horizon (Beautiful Horizons), AFEPEC (Feminist Organization for the Blooming of People and the Exercise of Citizenship), and Petit Lecteur (Littler Reader). Each organization seemed to anticipate the hard work ahead: preserving the decaying city, protecting women’s place in public, and carving out spaces for children. Their co-presence on this single street presupposed and entailed an alternative future beyond the fratricidal unraveling of the 1990s. Through in-depth interviews and participant observations with these organizations during sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oran, I argue public co-presence in post-civil war urban spaces encompasses a material practice of becoming in the everyday. Seemingly ordinary practices can enact alternative futures: a children’s story hour in a public park taken over by ‘delinquents;’ a public march through the forest of Les Planteurs, a former hideout for Islamist militants during the Black Decade; a coed coffee break at a café typically reserved for men only. These micro-acts of recuperating “the public” show how the future public is created by performing co-presence in spaces vacated by civil war. At work is the everyday practice of envisioning and performing the future, even when all signs point to its foreclosure.