The city of Tbilisi, current capital of the country of Georgia, has experienced a turbulent series of changes since the dawn of the modern period. Among these transformations have been the destruction of the essentially Persianate (Safavid-Qajar) city by Qajar Iran in 1795, its reconstruction and repopulation in the wake of the Russian annexation of Georgia in 1801, its elevation to the status of colonial capital and most populous city of the entire Caucasus region under Russian rule (1801-1917), its role as capital of independent Georgia during a brief period of independence (1918-1921), and finally becoming the capital of Georgia in the socialist (1921-1991) and postsocialist (1991-2014) periods. For much of this history, Tbilisi was a multiethnic and polyglot city: its transformation from a cosmopolitan to a specifically Georgian city is largely an outcome of the postwar era. Drawing both on Georgian and comparative urban literatures, this project seeks to understand the city as a historically layered object, in which the ethnographic present cannot be understood without reference to the haunting of these varied pasts. Each city is at the same time a single space with "multiple orderings, encounters, cores and planes; it is many places in one" (Lai 2007: 207). Cities are therefore intrinsically “multiple objects”, inviting multiple readings. In order to address the temporal and material heterogeneity of the city, this grant will treat Tbilisi (as well as more peripherally other Georgian cities, such as Batumi and "Lazika") as an "urban assemblage", composed of heterogeneous networks of human and non-human actors: people, pets, plants; quotidian and artistic practices, literatures, media; infrastructures and architectures. We seek to understand five "imagined cities" (Low 1996) which are assembled out of, and juxtaposed in, the temporally and spatially heterogeneous fabric of Tbilisi: