The description of public space usually hinges on two narratives of publicness: one narrative criticizes the State’s attempts to condition publicness on the basis of functionality, and the other denotes publicness with space that can be appropriated by ordinary people. However, there are no “pure” moments in which either narrative is neatly differentiated since they are simultaneously active, or fuzzy, in situations of everyday life. Exploring this fuzziness, we propose a visibility framework for studying the physical and social embodiment of publicness as a lived experience. The framework employs socio-spatial distance as a variable for interpreting the emergence of situations that promote urban justice. Based on visual ethnography in public spaces in Cairo and Alexandria, the framework allows us to interpret the multi-valence and uncertainty characterizing the fuzzy side of publicness. The article concludes with reflections on the tense interface of control and self-organization that animates the dynamics of street politics.

Responding to contemporary mechanisms of depoliticisation, some marginalised groups create political arenas independent from the State. The paper analyses how these groups utilise ‘cracks’ in the political landscape to forge counter-publics which transform unequal power structures. Positing that depoliticisation is always incomplete, an analytical framework is presented for understanding how ‘the political’ emerges and evolves in unexpected spaces of everyday life. The framework serves as a means to overcome some of the limitations of Rancière’s political ontology to operationalise in empirical research through integrating his notions with an understanding of self-organisation based on complexity science. Drawing on empirical research in Egypt, the paper demonstrates how the fusion between public spaces and online networks created a precondition for counter-publics to gradually revitalise local urban politics. The paper concludes with analytical considerations for inclusive city-makers who aim to engage productively with the transformative potential of such emergent counter-publics.

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