Papastergiou treats abandoned and underused urban sites as narrative disruptors rather than residual defects awaiting redevelopment. His iconic idea is the “leftover city”: a dispersed field of vacant plots, infrastructural margins and neglected interiors produced by fragmentation, crisis and dominant patterns of use. The theoretical contribution lies in connecting terrain vague to literature and cinema, where such spaces become allegories of lost identity, unlawful freedom, sensory recovery and alternative forms of life. Methodologically, the article reads Ballard, Jarmusch and Wenders comparatively, using narrative representation to reveal spatial meanings that architectural typology often excludes. The conceptual operation is counter-narration: residual space interrupts the city’s official coherence and permits suppressed temporalities, affects and practices to surface. The wider bridge reaches urban cultural studies, film theory, landscape criticism and spatial politics. Leftover sites are neither empty nor innocent; they hold the unresolved consequences of planning while sustaining forms of indeterminacy that programmed urbanism struggles to tolerate.