Diversity complicates everyday negotiations over the use of scarce urban public space, because it can potentially multiply the number of conflicting visions and make communication across class, cultural, and linguistic boundaries more difficult (Zukin 2010). At the same time, I have shown how conditions of persity in the community garden occasionally helped create spaces of resistance to larger power structures. Gardeners engaged and formed enduring ties with people from very dif- ferent backgrounds and ideas about the public space. This was facilitated by the characteristics of the community garden itself, including the sense of threat to its survival, the shared investment in its continuation, the parochial nature of much of the interactions, and a sense of common purpose and activity combined with the physical demarcation of the discrete space to maximize the potential of deliberation and coexistence of competing visions. Public spaces with more transitory patterns  of use, for instance, may not reach the same levels of engagement, although one can envision spaces other than community gardens that would exhibit some of the same characteristics. Libraries and flea markets, for instance, can facilitate meaningful interaction across cultural difference, realizing the interculturalist potential described by Sandercock (2004), where right to difference and right to participate in and occupy public space are continuously negotiated in daily interactions.

This community garden is situated in a rapidly changing neighborhood, experi- encing not just an influx of different immigrant groups, but also the development of housing and services for new affluent residents. With an enormous high-end com- plex planned for the immediate vicinity of the garden, the neighborhood will soon house many more residents, putting pressure on shared spaces such as the garden. The city owns the land of the community garden, and concern about its future was ever present. The green vision for the garden is about making the garden look good in a way that is aligned with cultural consumption preferences of new affluent resi- dents. It is part and parcel of the cultural changes that accompany the gentrification process: the community garden as a delectable sight that enhances the living envi- ronment of the affluent, mostly white professionals in the same way as an organic farmers market or a pedestrian plaza (Zukin 2010). The delectability is enhanced by a visual display of human persity, which draws middle-class newcomers to urban neighborhoods, even though their engagement with people who are different from them may remain minimal (Wessendorf 2013).

Thus, the long-term survival of the garden may be predicated on dialing down its persity—not necessarily its demographic persity, but persity of visions and viewpoints—and elevating one way of seeing the space to an overpowering para- digm for aesthetic and normative considerations. The community vision of the gar- den, especially, is threatened, as convivial socializing can easily be redefined as loitering and working-class sociability, in general, becomes criminalized (Chaskin and Joseph 2013; Freeman 2006; Patillo 2007). The community vision holds the most promise as a compromise between those who want to garden and those among the local residents, particularly those in the public housing development, who would rather see a park or a community center with open access. As such, the loss of the community vision of the garden is a blow to the claim of these longtime residents  on their neighborhood.

The implications of the dominance of one vision of the garden (the one held by the most advantaged gardeners and the city government agencies) are troubling for those who value democratic engagement and multicultural, multiclass alliances. A perse community garden in a gentrifying neighborhood may become scrubbed of the messy everyday work of deliberation across difference. The cultural destabiliza- tion and resistance that takes place through meaningful interaction may become min- imized, as one vision comes to dictate what the garden looks like and how people should use it. The unified front and consistent aesthetic presentation may safeguard the garden’s survival, but at the cost of the more meaningful practices of persity.