Urban space is a palimpsest – a layered ‘text’ continually overwritten through processes of erasure, displacement, and resistance. Explaining the concept of “palimpsestic spaces” and drawing on postcolonial literature, in particular Indian English literature and works in translation, Cecile Sandten examines how writers articulate cities marked by colonial histories, precarious mobilities, and the disappearance of communal life-worlds. Literary narratives from South Asia, i.e. Azra Tabassum’s Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis (2010) reveal how informal settlements and migrant neighbourhoods, function simultaneously as sites of vulnerability and as archives of survival and community. Contemporary works such as Kate Evans’s graphic novel Threads: From the Refugee Crisis (2017), a text which is set on European soil, and Marie Brassard’s play The Darkness (2003), which is set in Montreal, further expose how states of emergency – migration, homelessness, gentrification – in the Global North create palimpsestic spaces, in which temporary shelters and makeshift architectures become counter-archives that challenge dominant narratives of urban design and belonging. These artistic representations reject the dominant urban imaginary shaped by Western, masculinist, investor-driven planning cultures and open up alternative ways of reading and imagining the city. In doing so, they retrieve erased layers of urban life and suggest more inclusive and intercultural futures for contemporary cities.