Specific critical urban studies scholarship posits cities as spaces derived from their wider environments, aligning with SDG 11.4, which identifies them as natural cultural heritages requiring safeguarding. Following this trend, this chapter proposes and applies an ‘ethno-graphic’ approach, integrating conventional ethnography and visualisation techniques, to capture and convey (un)familiar narratives of the East Kolkata Wetlands—also known as Kolkata’s wastewaterscapes—about their effluent-fed socio-ecological system. Declensionist discourses incriminate urban sprawl and its catastrophic impact on this uniquely contested space with clashing priorities, specifically between the state and the wetland inhabitants. Our Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability (SMUS) sponsored Practical Empirical Implementation Project (PEIP) critically interrogates this narrative through ethnographic approaches and visualisation tools. By encompassing members from academia, civil society, wetland school students and practitioners, our PEIP team ‘wore’ the SMUS ‘glasses’ and deployed multi-modal qualitative and interactive methods to first internalise and then apply ‘ethno-graphy’ on the EKW. This chapter documents the wetland encounters our team experienced through the SMUS glasses, unravelling an (un)chronicled saga of urban nature, while laying out the ethno-visual novelty of the tool as an interactive-immersive spatial method to activate the social competence of practitioners in conserving natural-cultural heritage of Kolkata.