Shahjahanabad

Shah Jahan moved his capital from Agra and had a whole city laid out at once: a fort on the river, a great mosque on a rock outcrop, a wall with fourteen gates, and a central avenue with a canal running down the middle of it. The plan was formal, the execution fast — nine years from first stone to occupied capital — and it worked so well that the place has never stopped being used.

That is what makes Shahjahanabad different from the six cities before it. Tughlaqabad is scrub, Siri is fragments, Firozabad is a citadel in a park; Shahjahanabad is Chandni Chowk on a Tuesday afternoon. It has been sacked by Nadir Shah, gutted by the British after 1857 and rebuilt around every time, and it is still, by a distance, the densest and most alive part of Delhi.