Times Square and the infrastructures of the public

The aim of this research is to track the networks, relationships, and heterogeneous trajectories stabilized in Times Square in Manhattan, NYC, regarding the controversy about the character of the public in that place. This controversy is mapped around the recent debates about the use, the nature and the configuration of the pedestrian plazas in the area, generated by the proliferation of shows and informal performances, after its pedestrianization in 2009. To track these networks, relationships, and trajectories which appear in this controversy, it is proposed, as a final product, a series of cartographies, each one with a text, either an article or a book chapter. To carry out this piece of work, it will used a mixed structure of techniques and methods, with a solid base of ethnography and documentary research. Nevertheless, the core of this strategy is the application of one approach from the Social Studies of Science, specifically since the Actor-Network Theory: The analysis of sociotechnical controversies.