My paper offers an ethnographic comparison of two theatre workshops for youth in Cairo—one held at a state-owned Cultural Palace, and the other at a private, internationally-connected cultural centre—in order to investigate the spatial and embodied imagination of citizens of the future at these institutions. Teaching theatre as a form of transnational cultural heritage, at the Giza Cultural Palace, and a means of practical knowledge, in the improvisation-based workshop at Studio Emadeddin, outlined contrasting versions of cosmopolitan citizenship. I argue that the Cultural Palace workshop put the place of culture at a distance, requiring the mediation of state intellectuals to form the cosmopolitan citizen. Meanwhile, the focus on cultivating communication and relational skills in the private studio workshop imagined global citizenship in the here and now. How is the idea of the cosmopolitan Egyptian citizen shaped within the competition for cultural authority between state and private institutions? How is the decline of a specific cosmopolitan aesthetic in the neoliberal era transforming the idea of cultural education?