The turn of the 21st century has witnessed rapid urban transformations across the Global South, including in cities such as Delhi that have historically hosted large and diverse populations. In recent years, migrants from the continent of Africa have also begun to constitute a fresh entry on the city’s social landscape. Yet, fractious exchanges and racial tensions have accompanied this migration with the figure of the African migrant largely stigmatised as “illegal” in the Indian imaginery. Drawing upon long term ethnography with West African migrants in Delhi, this talk critically examines notions of “informality”, “illegality” and racialised difference as shedding insight into processes of migration and urbanism in Delhi. It proposes an analysis of myriad encounters- between changing city forms and identitites, between the state, people and market, and between conjugations of material and culture- as crucial for understanding contemporary processes of city-making as unfolding within and between the Global South.