The work attempts to present a theoretical relook at the concept of margins in Southern Urban practices against the backdrop of urbanization in Asian cities. This allows one to understand the marginality of the ghats (steps leading down to the river) as an extension to the theorization of Global South as a metaphor for unequal power relations. The history of Kolkata’s ghats has been quintessentially a montage of a deltaic village’s transition to a megacity, its labour, livelihoods and political ecologies around a long, muddy, aqueous terrain. Urban Scholarship has established the role played by capital in appropriating everyday city spaces by valorising certain spaces and discarding others. However, field observations reveal that the entanglements of cultural politics and situated histories of knowledge shape up subjectivities, conflicts and the nature of powerplays in the making of Hooghly’s riverfronts. Using Lefebvre’s triad of ‘Production of Space’, I, argue that the everyday spaces of ghats are lived spaces at the land–water interfaces, which have been pushed to the margins of amnesia in the hustle of world-class placemaking practices through grand beautification projects. Ghats here present a constituency of city-makers with their subcultural, affirmative claims to the city through the production of vernacular, situated urban spaces which are never marginal to the everyday process of building and sustaining the city; but only appear ‘marginal’ to the accumulative strategies of capital. Exploring a series of multi-stakeholder conflicts, I unpack how power gets constantly exerted and mediated through a broader framework of situated cultural politics.