Urban space can be understood as a palimpsest—a layered “text” continually overwritten through erasure, displacement, and resistance. Drawing on postcolonial literature, particularly Indian English writing and works in translation, Cecile Sandten examines how authors depict cities shaped by colonial histories, precarious mobilities, and the erosion of communal life-worlds. Narratives from South Asia, such as Azra Tabassum’s Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis (2010), show how informal settlements and migrant neighbourhoods function both as sites of vulnerability and as archives of survival and community. Works like Kate Evans’s graphic novel Threads: From the Refugee Crisis (2017), set in Europe, and Marie Brassard’s play The Darkness (2003), set in Montreal, further reveal how migration, homelessness, and gentrification produce palimpsestic spaces in the Global North. In these contexts, temporary shelters and improvised architectures become counter-archives that challenge dominant narratives of urban design and belonging. Such representations question investor-driven planning imaginaries and recover erased layers of urban life, suggesting more inclusive urban futures.