This panel examines literary and cultural urbanisms in the Global South in the context of reframing repair. Until recently, cities in the Global South have been examined mainly as models of crisis, dysfunction, and brokenness. The urgent work of repairing their imperfect conditions has, in turn, been perceived solely in terms of rapid and uneven development in official discourse. Scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler, Filip de Boeck, Ananya Roy, Achille Mbembe, and others, have instead urged us to rethink ruins, lacks, lags, and gaps as origin sites for emergent forms and practices that alter conditions of the possible.