While moments of historic rupture do usher in radically new conditions for claiming urban space and power, the eras they cleave do not align neatly in the lives of the urban precariat. Rather, they overspill and interdigitate, saturating the present. This paper vivifies heterotemporality as an analytic, rather than descriptive, category for urban politics and scholarship. Drawing together Walter Benjamin's radical mode of historical and image‐centric inquiry with Mimi Nguyen's and Dai Jinhua's critiques of recombinant imperial formations, I seek to unsettle the uncritical chronopolitics of rupture that has practically and discursively undergirded dispossession in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Arguing against strategic representations of urban rupture as only a break from the past, I offer instead a dialectical conception of rupture as interacting movements of break and amplification of the past in the present. Advancing ‘archiveology’ as an urban research praxis that activates a heterotemporal, collective urban archive – composed of the built landscape, oral accounts, historical records and filmic representations – shocks the potential of what has been, constellating alternative politics of the present. I suggest that this theoretical‐methodological framework offers critical insights beyond Phnom Penh, especially for other historic‐geographies that have been strategically attenuated via categorical post‐s (e.g., post‐colonial, post‐socialist, post‐conflict). Short Arguing against strategic representations of urban rupture as only a break from the past, this paper offers instead a dialectical conception of rupture as interacting movements of break and amplification of the past in the present. Methodologically, the paper advances ‘archiveology’ as an urban research praxis that actives a heterotemporal, collective urban archive in order to shock the potential of ‘what has been’, for an alternative politics of the present.