Tuesday, June 02, 2026
Of Urban Villages in Amritkaal
The recent collapse of a 5 story building in Champa Gali, the now upmarket area of Said ul Ajaib, is sad, but also inevitable in a sense.
Any one familiar with the city of Delhi is possibly also familiar with its many novelties called Urban Villages. Some of Delhis most popular and celebrated addresses are found in these. It started with the famous designer ghetto of Hauz Khas Village popularly called HKV. In the 2000s it was the place to be. Designers stores, Art Galleries, and Pubs and restaurants. Designed by by some other bigger Architecture practices of the city. Stores like Ogaan, Delhi Art Gallery, Restaurants like Gunpowder, OTB, Yeti and Naivaidyam made it a place to be seen. A great space for young creative and small business owners to make a start and grow.
My initial fascination with the suburb, and its growing popularity, was slowly replaced with a utter fear of the possibility of fire event, with pubs and faces on the 3rd with barely 3 foot wide staircases for escape. I did not fancy ending my life there, and completely stopped going there. I cannot recall, but i do remember some fairly fancy pubs there going up on smoke some years later. I have not been there since.
Over time HKV got posh, upmarket and expensive and chocked, space became hard to find, and rents prohibitive, Other similar villages then found their chance at prosperity - Shahpur Jat, Nizamuddin, Chattarpur, Mehrauli, and Said ul Ajaib among them. Easily accessible to the Fancy South Delhi crowd. Cafes, Restaurants and Designer stores started showing up.
Mehrauli - accessible from both Delhi and Gurgaon, with great road connectivity for your fancy luxury car and with s sprinkling of some Delhis biggest names of hospitality dotting the spaces between designer labels, became a destination for the most expensive and sought after Bridal wear in the country.
Near by in Chatterpur, the humble Dhan Mill, complex that started off as an alt destination, with interesting cafes, and stores, has been building itself into a full fledged mall for the ultra rich, slowly going form “Design-led” to “Money- driven” in its choices of outlets or should we say it command of rental.
All urban villages were not so fortunate. Ayanagar for instance remains potholed waterlogged and fairly un kept, low rental accommodations for staff and working populations who cannot afford rents in Gurugram. Ghitorni and Sultanpur.- on the MG road, a market of factory outlets, and furniture and home decor stores,
There are others that transformed much like Kotla Mubarakpur, into very large hardware and building material markets of south Delhi, long before fashion and food were talking points in Delhi.
There is also Humayunpur, that has now transpormed into the undisputed Food Capital of the Delhi.
And then there are others like Khanpur, and Said-ul-Ajaib. On the fringes of South Delhi, that could have become rich, expensive , and gentrified areas, but did not. The rexact easons are hard to arrive at.
Designer destination or not what is common to all these urban villages is a lack of any kind of regulation. The absence of building controls, applicable bye-laws and most of all life and safety regulations.
Building activity in most of the country is at best a craft exercise - a learned on the job mason becomes a self styled contractor and takes on building work. It is not a regulated profession, with training and licensing. There are no engineering norms, no safety norms and no checks from local authorities. Our urban villages function in a similar manner. In Mehrauli for instance there are apartments blocks with excess of 20 apartments, without any fire fighting provisions and dead ends that would not pass municipal sanction anywhere in the country.
What was one day a 2-floor house, suddenly disappears gets replaced by a 6 floor apartment block of pigeon holes. Built on matchstick columns by a local building hand who now calls himself a contractor. In other places, floors are added on floors, with reckless abandon, rents from warehousing, coaching centres, PG accommodation for the thousands of young children hoping to make a a future in the big cities of Delhi. I was one of them in 1998 - staying in Bed Sarai, preparing for my entrance to Architecture School.
The building that collapsed in Said-ul-Ajaib, and forgive my saying so, is not an anomaly. No, whatever you might make of it from the news, from sound bytes and much circulated videos of people talking about having raised alarms and informed authorities - this is how they function and why they are viable places for business.
The lack of regulation and sanctioning, no real landuse definition, and of course huge electoral clout at local levels are part of the equations that keep these places viable. Buildings and lands, like in the case of Mehrauli’s most posh addresses, are owned by well connected, extremely rich and socially important people.
So while the building collapse, and the loss of life is sad, and avoidable, it is just another event in the life of Urban India. And given the age of these villages and their buildings, and growing pressure to make money, I would wager, these will become more frequent in the coming years. And no one is going to do a damn thing about it.
My condolences go out the families that lost so much more than just one fo their children that evening. But in a nation of 1.4 billion 5 lives is a blip on Hashtag Amritkaal and its 5Trillion Dollar economy.
