In both Egypt and Sudan, public spaces were lost to privatization and commodification during the last decade. Meanwhile, large Sudanese and Egyptian cities witnessed the development of participatory public space design initiatives. Many studies have looked at change in Egyptian and Sudanese public spaces (Alraouf 2011; Bahreldin 2020). More largely, public space has been the object of crucial debates about the right to the city (Lefebvre 1974) and the just city (Iveson 2013). Discourses on citizenship and the right to the city in Sudan and Egypt are proliferating today in the media and on social networks, generally in line with liberal visions of representative democracy. To reflect on these concepts, we organized a conference in 2019 with the support of CEDEJ, the Center for Islamic studies at Sophia University in Tokyo, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in Cairo.1 The proceedings were published by Sophia University in 2021. This special issue stresses the interdisciplinary nature of the study of public spaces and features works from a sociologist, a geographer, an anthropologist and two urban planners working on Cairo and Khartoum.