The Future Cities Seminar (taught at IAAC in Barcelona for CIEE exchange students) stages the urban as a vast field to be decoded through hyper-reading—an expanded mode of interpretation that moves across texts, images, and heterogeneous media formats. Structured along a sequence of conceptual toolboxes, the course treats reading itself as a performative and multimodal operation, mobilizing science-fiction film fragments as critical-aesthetic vignettes that refract and estrange the theoretical arguments of (conventional) academic materials, exposing the contradictions of twenty-first-century synthetic landscapes and machinic ecologies while opening speculative pathways toward the imagination of alternative urban futures beyond the historical horizon of capitalism.