Abstract

This seminar is about conceptualising comparison in the fields of urban studies and ethnographic knowledge construction, by looking at the interrelationship between time and blight in two riverbank spaces in Turin (Italy). The study suggests an experimental and relational approach to comparison that is retrospective and processual. Therefore, the aim of the research was not to compare how processes of abandonment worked in different contexts. It was only while conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the two spaces separately that correspondences, both similarities and differences, have emerged throughout the endless and intertwined operations of observation, description and comparison. The seminar is then an attempt to foreground the practical and epistemological opportunities and challenges of engaging with the ‘messiness’ of ethnographic practice as a means of researching the relational and complex nature of socio-spatial realities.