Layers of settler urbanization and indigenous relational place-making: uncovering an ongoing palimpsest

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ABSTRACT Cities in settler colonial states imply a continuous settlement in Indigenous territories and on unceded land. With each layer of colonial enterprises, there is also Indigenous resistance to it, which in turn brings on new interruptions and displacements. Each layer relates to previous ones and, as an urban palimpsest, public spaces become multilayered places, with permanent processes of displacements and dispossession and re-territorialization and re-possession. And if the settler colonial city is a useful framework to understand the multiple layers of colonial processes happening in an urban public space, we suggest that the notion of the palimpsest enlightens also the multiple layers of Indigenous presence and continuous place-making as a resistance to these processes.