The Global City often evokes the imperial metropolis: New York, London, Paris. These cities are considered “global” because they are urban nerve centers where a variety of transnational processes intersect: the deterritorializing and reterritorializing circulations of capital and technology, the rise of networked constellations that bypass the borders of the nation-state, as well as the flexible mobility of people, commodities, and cultures. At the same time, from Beijing to Bombay, Belfast to Gaza, and the favelas of São Paulo to the high rises of Dubai, some of the most dramatic urban transformations of the 21st century have occurred in former and current colonies. This course examines how the Global City, in the North and South alike, has been largely forged in the crucible of a colonial modernity which continues to shape and constrain the possibilities for contemporary urban experience. During the semester, we will explore how the Global City is something much more than a statically built architectural space by approaching it from a variety of angles: as a configuration of dynamic, phantasmatic, and psycho-social infrastructures; a highly volatile field of inclusion and exclusion, mobility and confinement, accumulation and dispossession; an aspirational space that stimulates desire, nurtures dreams, and promises pleasure; an indifferent space of disposability, rote habit, and percolating violence; a global nodal point of space-time compression that produces vacuous pockets of space-time expansion at its margins; and, finally, as a topography networked into the abstracting and anonymous world of the capitalist market but also localized through informal circuits of economic and social exchange. While we will familiarize ourselves with foundational theorists of urban space including Saskia Sassen, Mike Davis, and Abdou Malik Simone, our primary focus will be on how various narrative forms - the novel, poetry, film, photography, digital mappings - can illuminate aesthetic itineraries, deviant mobilities, and urban imaginaries as they navigate, confront, or deftly avoid capture in economies of neoliberal development and necropolitical practices of securitization and counterinsurgency.