For so long our urban narratives have focused on the moment of arrival of the migrant, fleeing despair and poverty in towns and villages. This Introduction argues that we are now being challenged to journey to the end of the city to see where it stops, and where its others begin. In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic, for the first time in decades, produced a noticeable departure of populations away from cities, as haunting images of emptied out streets and ghostly sirens of ambulances and police cars shone the spotlight on the collapsed infrastructures of health and social welfare, and indeed also of community and solidarity. Disaffection, displacement, injury, loss, sickness, waste, and returns away even from the much celebrated global cities have become the defining features of places that were once seen as centres of cosmopolitanism and capitalist prosperity, as well as of new possibilities of belonging beyond the confines of nation states and nation-based identities. Indeed, the seesaw-like opening and closing of national borders, the unpredictable restrictions on travel via quarantine regimes, the ever-present threat of transmission and infection, the intensification of social anomie and economic precarity, the heightening of social disparities, the spiralling of sexual violence at home and on the streets, all point towards the urgency and necessity of rethinking the concept of the global city. The Introduction offers an account of this itinerary in the context of literary and cultural narratives that critically record the entangled histories of these spaces but also provide openings for reimagining global cities in the future.