The theoretical concepts “urban informality,” “periphery,” and “everyday state,” primarily emerging from the “new geographies” of the Global South, are used to make sense of the complicated state–society interactions leading to the transformation of land at the rural–urban interface of the postcolonial metropolitan capital of Delhi. The history of land development in a village called Khora is examined, which, located at the intersection of Delhi, Noida and Ghaziabad, has transformed from a sparsely populated village in 1971 to one of the densest “unauthorised colonies” in Asia in 2011.