ABSTRACT
The twenty-first-century city of stark wealth inequalities and vast economic and cultural transnationalism is taken up in Teju Cole's novel Open City, the story of Nigerian-German psychiatrist Julius, who spends much of his time away from work wandering through the city and reflecting on what he sees. And in fact, given the widespread critical currency the concept currently enjoys, much of the extant criticism of Open City focuses on its thematics of cosmopolitanism. The rationale that is generally given by policymakers and urban developers to rationalize and facilitate the spatial manifestations of this process of creative destruction is to attribute "obsolescence" to areas and ways of life targeted for replacement by more profitable structures. Most of the text plays out amidst the milieus of these social-spatially converging global cities, narrativizing their relation to the postindustrial image economy and to each other, but its climatic section is set in and around Moscow.
