The transgressive appeal of the rooftop space is not a recent development – in the 1920s, Mexico City’s rooftop azoteas became a hotbed of creative thinking. A movement is currently underway in Spain to claim rooftops for community use –privately owned spaces that are, because of their exposed position, very public. Events and performances taking place on these terraces are returning life to this once well-used level of these cities.

At the same time, rooftops spaces are being harnessed for their property potential. In Barcelona, city planning authorities have welcomed La Casa por el Tejado, a project to drop prefabricated homes on to the city’s abundant flat rooftops in an effort to increase the supply of homes. Under the scheme, the owners of the building give architect Joan Artes and his team permission to build an extra storey in exchange for carrying out improvements to the communal facilities. A more troubling example of capitalising on rooftops can be found in Hong Kong, where eye-watering property prices have resulted in a proliferation of rooftop slums: cramped, windowless shacks, often poorly constructed out of cheap materials, with facilities shared between several families.

Meanwhile, in Delhi the roofspace is vanishing. Since India’s economy liberalised in the 1990s, its planning laws have changed to allow increasingly high-rise construction in residential areas – raising the allowance to four storeys led to the demolition of family homes to make room for developer-built apartments. “Real estate in Delhi is so expensive now that it doesn’t make sense for anyone to not use buildable space,” says Sonali Rastogi, a member of the public conservation group Delhi Urban Arts Commission and co-founder of architecture practice Morphogenesis. “And that has lead to the decline of the barsati.”

While they were never really affordable for the city’s poorest, high prices are gradually making barsatis an elitist concept, out of the reach of even middle-class city dwellers, argues Rewal. “Many youngsters with their first jobs can no longer afford them so they are being transformed into boutique residences lapped up by expats from Europe.”

There was a time, he recalls, when light, open terraces were not a luxury and young working people and fledgling artists could afford to rent barsatis. As a result, the rooftops of Delhi become associated somewhat with the city’s artists and intellectuals. “Delhi may not have flourished in the manner of Mexico, where the azoteas were incandescent with creativity, but there is something about rooftop cities that encourages curiosity, and that mitigates against conservatism,” says Delhi-based journalist and author Nilanjana Roy. “Barsatis in south Delhi were affordable, and they encouraged a kind of open flow of ideas – one reason why artists and actors took to them.”

Writer and historian William Dalrymple lived in one too, when he first moved to Delhi, as did writer and activist Arundhati Roy, painter MF Husain and writer Pankaj Mishra. In Anita Desai’s short story, The Rooftop Dwellers, the protaganist Moyna moves into a simple rooftop room, whose “very bareness gave her the freedom to indulge her wildest dreams and fancies”. The terrace, where she entertains friends “just as she had imagined an adult working woman in the metropolis might do”, is a “clear, empty space under an empty sky, with a view of all the other rooftops stretching out on even side … giving her a sense of being the empress of all she surveyed.”

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“Charm” is perhaps what is now lacking for many when it comes to the barsati. Rachit Tiwary had not heard the term before he moved into his apartment in the affluent suburb of Greater Kailash, walking distance from the television studios of news channel NDTV where he works. His spacious terrace has a small gazebo and a porch swing. But the cost of living in Delhi is become an increasing concern. “A quarter of my income goes on renting this place, which is crazy,” he explains. He hopes to move within the next six months to a two-bedroom apartment – most likely in the neighbouring city of Gurgaon, where properties are more affordable, and modern – offering the convenience of communal facilities and maintenance.

Many young professionals now live on the city’s periphery, in “satellite cities” such as Gurgaon and Noida, vast new cities of gated developments, malls, offices and highways. Economic factors have made the shift inevitable, but has such spatial dispersion been accompanied by a decline in creativity and social radicalism? Roy appreciates the concern. “Up to the early 2000s, the city’s architecture was markedly friendlier and more open than it is now,” she says. “The gated communities and walled enclaves that have come up are more formal, perhaps more intellectually conservative, spaces. The sense that a lot of Delhi’s intellectual life now takes place in small, gated communities of the mind is hard to ignore.”

But she cautions against overly romanticising Delhi’s previous form. “Friends in Gurgaon say that a thriving intellectual community is gradually developing there.” Rastogi agrees: “The hubs around Delhi are now maturing to a level of cultural independence – there are events, theatre, art, and independent social activism. After all, how long can such a rapidly sprawling city continue to believe that its centre will always form every aspect of its inhabitants’ cultural experience?”