Theories of the Urban (TotU) is a year-long triptych seminar that treats urbanization as a multi-scalar socio-spatial process to be critically and speculatively read across media, disciplines, and cognitive registers. Structured in three volumes—I. On (Reading) Urbanization; II. Fictitious Capital & the City; and III. Anthropocene Futures—the course mobilizes critical urban theory, media studies, and science fiction to interrogate the entangled political-economic and techno-ecological dimensions of planetary urbanization. Anchored in the methodological interplay between close-reading, hyper-reading, and machine-reading, the seminar foregrounds distributed and artificial cognition as part of the shifting epistemic architecture of contemporary knowledge production, inviting students to experiment with hybrid formats—micro-essays, hyper-essays, glossaries, and speculative digital postcards—as vehicles for decoding the synthetic, more-than-human landscapes of twenty-first-century urbanization. In doing so, TotU advances reading itself as a critical design act: a practice of estrangement through which finance, climate crisis, media systems, and algorithmic governance are grasped as interlocking layers of the contemporary urban condition.