The development of the centre is a major challenge in relation to the international competition among cities. Today's redevelopment projects not only shape urban spaces, but also contribute to the construction of a set of winning images. Heritage has a fundamental role to play in this process, because it justifies some of the characteristics of the inner city and the need to convey them to posterity. Therefore, the theme of "urban renewal" is a crucial argument: development does not simply create an ex-novo urban framework, but brings back to life a grandeur that has already existed. Cairo, the capital of Egypt, is an interesting example of this process of imposing a past, selected through the manipulation of the nostalgic feelings of a part of the population, to be valued both in urban planning, and in the construction of a set of winning images. This article, based on my thesis research, analyzes, on the one hand, the use by Cairo developers of selective memory as an instrument of a dominant urbanism and, on the other hand, the tensions that have developed since January 2011 between this imposed narration and the renewed practices of the inhabitants in the centre. The selection of the memory transforms and reinterprets the nostalgic feeling of some social categories in order to legitimize urban exclusion of other social groups. However, this nostalgia for a bygone era has to deal with unprecedented expectations for the future, which have guided a deep political change and which redesigns urban territory.