This paper focuses on the material construction and afterlife of post-colonial ambition, and it looks into the ways the state of post-independence sought to deploy its political order through urban space. Building on literatures of colonial and postcolonial urban forms, memory, ruins and debris (Çelik, 1997; Edensor, 2007; Jacobs, 1996; Stoler, 2013) my presentation uses city topographies, architectures and mundane relics as monuments and texts allowing for some sort of readability of materialized memory (Weigel, 1996, p. 37,112). Thus, with reference to Cairo, my presentation approaches city space as one of the monuments of the state (Stoler, 2000). It focuses on one monument in the city of Cairo to interrogate the ambitious -yet vulnerable- attempts of staging and controlling the urban spatial-symbolic order in the postcolonial state. The monument of the Unknown Soldier in Nasr City conceived and constructed in the mid 1970s sheds light on the post-colonial state’s capacity and control in shaping the urban spectacle of the capital city, as well as the fragility and chance that subscripts this appearance of control. I draw on archival material gathered through fieldwork; specifically the personal collection of the urban planner of the neighbourhood where the monument eventually came to be, as well as interviews with the designer of the monument, and his personal collection of photographs. I analyze this material to show how the monument and its landscape performed as a spectacle, an event, materiality and discourse of post-independence nationalism, and state commemoration (Wedeen, 1999, Anderson, 1991). The present trace of this monument opens up an investigation of the urban politics of space production in 1970s Egypt, its actors and its imaginaries. Cairo of the 1970s remains under-studied, but -it is argued- is central in critically engaging with contemporary Cairo as a metaphor of disillusionment with the expired emancipatory futures of post-independence.