This project uses emptiness – a concrete historical formation (see What is it?) – as a tool for relational comparison that leads to generalization. This does not mean treating emptiness as an abstract concept, but rather moving emptiness in all its empirical richness horizontally, from the Latvian-Russian borderlands to Ukraine, Russia, Eastern Germany, Armenia, and Romania. These sites are historically and geopolitically different, yet they all experienced capitalism after socialism, and in all of them, people are living amidst empty buildings, disintegrating social relations, and uncertain futures. The ways in which people respond – in terms of everyday practices, governance, and meaning-making – diverge: if in Latvia urban elites consider emptying to be a matter of perception, in Russia experts argue over whether to address it through managed shrinking or frontier resettlement. Fieldwork might yield insights about different emic interpretive frameworks, and we welcome them. The project is designed to refine analytical frameworks through relational comparison in order to lead to insights about the changing landscape of power in and beyond concrete locations (see Locations for more).