On December 10, 2021, my doctoral dissertation was officially published: Mirrors and Labyrinths: Learning from Times Square how to make an urban-STS ethnography. Written from and with Times Square after its pedestrianization, the project asks a simple question with a demanding consequence: how do you represent a heterogeneous reality without closing it down? My answer is not only conceptual—it is also formal. The dissertation is built as a kamal (a navigation instrument): a table of instructions plus cartographic elements designed to help readers move through an “unstable and effervescent geography” made of spaces, practices, and situations gathered on the ground. It is meant to orient without prescribing a single route.
Before getting into details, here’s a quick map of the dissertation’s architecture. Rather than unfolding as a single argument from start to finish, it is built as a set of interlinked components—conceptual, narrative, and cartographic—that can be entered from different points. These parts work together to make the dissertation readable as a navigational experiment: a way of moving through Times Square’s simultaneity without reducing it to one storyline.
What it’s about (in its main parts)
- A navigable form (the kamal): a Table of Instructions that works as an entryway to a “multilayered labyrinth of forking paths,” inviting readers to simulate multiple realities by linking stories, reflections, vignettes, and other ethnographic materials.
- Multiple routes through the research: including a linear version, but also alternative paths that foreground (among other things) speculative method-making, fieldwork vignettes, controversies, and multimodal artifact design.
- Times Square as multiplicity: the dissertation treats Times Square as a “multiple multiplicity,” composed of simultaneous spatialized effervescences—many Times Squares inside Times Square—where what matters is how associations stabilize (and destabilize) place in real time.
- Pedestrianization as a key thread: one chapter, for instance, explicitly takes on the pedestrianization “before, during, and after,” unpacking negotiations, challenges, and the idea of pedestrianization as an experimental project.
What I think is most original here is the wager that method, writing, and design are part of the empirical problem, not an afterthought. The dissertation’s contribution to urban ethnography and urban-STS is to approach urban transformation not as a single story of planning success/failure, but as a shifting ecology of infrastructures, bodies, rules, affects, media, and situated improvisations that coexist and interfere. By turning the dissertation into a navigational device—full of vignettes, inserts, and cross-links that continuously disrupt linear reading—it tries to match Times Square’s own condition: crowded with simultaneity, dense with partial versions, always on the verge of becoming something else.
It also contributes to multimodal ethnography by treating representation as craft: by explicitly inviting readers to navigate, to get lost, to take routes, and even to visualize their own movements through the text (rather than consuming an “explained” city from a distance). In that sense, the dissertation is not only a study of Times Square, New York City, and pedestrianization—it is also an argument with Times Square about how urban knowledge can be assembled when the object refuses to stay still. The result is a dissertation that aims to be usable beyond the site: a portable set of sensibilities and devices for studying urban transformations while staying faithful to multiplicity.
You can download the dissertation here