Delhi is a city I had to learn how to see.

For years, it was partly functional to me: an arrival point, a departure point, the place between the airport and wherever else I was going in India. Over time, that relationship changed. Most recently, I spent four months in India with Delhi as my base while developing The Artisan Archive, my platform focused on craft, culture and climate solutions.

Now, operating at this intersection ~ of craft, culture and climate ~ means I’m often thinking about the relationship between past, present and future: what we inherit, what we choose to preserve, and what those histories might teach us about what comes next.

There are few cities where the past is as casually embedded in the present as it is in Delhi. Rome comes to mind. You can be sitting in traffic, looking at a pharmacy or billboard or someone balancing an impossible number of objects on a motorbike, and then suddenly there is a tomb that has been standing for five hundred years.

History here is not neatly cordoned off.
It interrupts you.

Delhi is also much greener than its reputation suggests. Some of my happiest afternoons have been at Lodhi Gardens, where tombs from the Sayyid and Lodi dynasties coexist with joggers, picnics, aunties walking in groups, and couples finding privacy beneath trees. I love the casualness of that relationship with history: monuments that might elsewhere be isolated behind gates simply exist within the rhythms of everyday life.

Sunder Nursery carries that relationship between history and landscape even further. The grounds contain a remarkable concentration of Mughal-era monuments, while the nursery itself was established by the British in 1913 to propagate trees for the building of New Delhi. Nearly a century later, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture began working with public agencies to restore the larger landscape.

What emerged is an exercise in repair: historic tombs conserved using traditional techniques, old water systems revived, and gardens and biodiversity habitats reintroduced across the site. I love that the restoration treats ecology and architecture as part of the same history ~ and that a landscape shaped by successive eras of Delhi has been returned to the city as public space.

I would also make time for Humayun’s Tomb. Built in the sixteenth century, it was the first great garden-tomb of the Mughal period in India, organized around the charbagh ~ a four-part garden divided by water channels that would become central to Mughal architecture and eventually influence the Taj Mahal.

Knowing even a little of the history changes what you see. The geometry of the garden, the relationship between water and stone, and the meeting of Persian and Indian architectural traditions become part of the experience rather than simply a beautiful backdrop.

I tend to understand places through material culture, so inevitably I understand Delhi through craft.

Dilli Haat is one of the places I return to for craft discovery. It's been around since the 90s as a permanent, urban interpretation of the traditional haat ~ the periodic markets that have long been part of rural life across India ~ bringing artisans from different parts of the country into one space. What keeps me returning is that rotating geography: textiles from one region, metalwork from another, basketry, embroidery, jewelry, food. India is often spoken about as though it were a singular cultural entity; spend an afternoon here and that idea becomes immediately absurd.

The National Crafts Museum offers a quieter way into the same conversation. Craft is presented not merely as decoration or heritage, but as knowledge ~ as evidence of how communities have understood material, ecology, labor, geography and beauty. Afterwards, eat at Café Lota, whose menu approaches regional Indian food with similar curiosity.

I am increasingly suspicious of the way we are taught to travel: efficiently. See the monument. Take the photograph. Buy the object. Move on. Travelling lightly, to me, is less about perfect behavior than about attention. Ask who made what you are buying. Learn why a building is there. Leave room in the day for nothing to happen.

A place does not owe us instant legibility. Delhi makes that especially clear. There are layers upon layers here: Sultanate and Mughal histories, colonial planning and contemporary India; gardens grown around tombs, craft traditions from across the country, old structures absorbed into daily life. You begin to understand one Delhi only to realize there is another underneath it.

The pleasure is in noticing the layers ~ and knowing there will always be more beneath them.