A conversation on resilience would be incomplete without a conversation on decay. Throughout urban spaces in the global south today, one witnesses decay, which is accepted and negotiated constantly. In certain instances, it invokes a sense of poverty and sensibilities of curiosity and exploration which the sanitized space sometimes fails to provoke. The challenge is a complex narrative which crosscuts architectural theory, practice, urban planning and culture. This paper offers a variety of contrasting examples of how decay takes an aesthetic form and offers room for alternative negotiations to be identified at the same time. As a conversation on new urbanism, this phenomenon can be tracked across a variety of urban cases. This paper presents two examples of such undertakings and attempts by meticulous documentation, comparative study and photographic representation to present a reasonable rationale. As a theoretical discussion, the paper also interrogates the need for bringing back the likes of Laurie Baker’s style in re-synthesizing objectivity in equitable architectural manifestations considering the large impact of impatient capital on these new landscapes.