In this paper, we build on the ongoing disciplinary debate in cultural anthropology concerning changing understanding of contemporary ethnographic practice and consider our pedagogical work with students as a form of what Kim Fortun recently defined as “ethnographic experiment” for the contemporary. We describe our methodology in which we are inspired especially by the tradition of educational anthropology and participatory action research to create spaces of collaborative encounters that we call urban laboratories. We give examples of our ethnographic and pedagogical work with students that generate new ways of framing representations of the city’s past contained through the process of neoliberal urban transformations.