Cecile Sandten

Urban spaces are continuously reshaped through processes of planning, destruction, and reconstruction that in turn inscribe, erase, and reorder social relations in the city. My presentation will explore urban space as a palimpsest – a layered ‘text’ continually overwritten through processes of erasure, oblivion, displacement, and resistance. Explaining the concept of “palimpsestic spaces” (Nebelin, Sandten 2024) and drawing on postcolonial literature, in particular Indian English literature and works in translation, I examine how writers articulate cities being 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. Trans. Shveta Sarda (2010) reveals 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 (La Noirceur, 2003), which is set in Montreal, further expose how states of emergency – migration, homelessness, gentrification – also in the Global North create palimpsestic spaces, in which temporary shelters and makeshift architectures become counter-archives that challenge dominant narratives of urban practices, design and belonging. These narrative representations reject the dominant urban imaginary shaped by Western, masculinist, investor-driven planning cultures and open up alternative ways of reading and narrating the city. In doing so, they retrieve erased layers of urban life and suggest more inclusive and multicultural futures for contemporary cities.