KEY WORDS: community gardens; conflict; culture; persity; gentrification; inequality; public space.

INTRODUCTION

Public space often plays host to the battles of gentrification, the process whereby capital reinvestment displaces low-income residents, as high-income resi- dents move in, and development alters neighborhood landscapes (Davidson and  Lees 2005). The struggle between users of parks, sidewalks, and plazas and the elites who strive to control these spaces through exclusion and privatization has been amply documented (e.g., Billingham and McDonough Kimelberg 2013; Low and Smith 2006; Shepard and Smithsimon 2011; Zukin 1995). In New York City and elsewhere, community gardens are sites of confrontation between city-backed devel- opers and local residents fighting to preserve these spaces of alternative production, community, and ethnic expression (Eizenberg 2013; L’Annunziata 2010; Martinez 2010; Schmelzkopf 1995; Shepard and Smithsimon 2011; Zukin 2010). In much of this literature, as well as in public discourse, community gardens are portrayed as spaces of antigentrification activism and struggle for the right to the city. But there is also evidence that gentrification struggles, particularly over culture, take place within these gardens (Martinez 2010; Zukin 2010). Beyond gentrification and the

1 Research for this article was undertaken within the GlobalperCities Project funded by the European Research Council, Project No: 269784, and based at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Go€ttingen, Germany.

2 Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, Massa- chusetts 02125-3393; class- and race-based conflicts that it brings, many community gardens are situated in urban contexts characterized by persity stemming from waves of international migration, which creates a complex web of intersecting categories of race, ethnicity, legal status, and language (Farrell and Lee 2011; Logan and Zhang 2011; Vertovec 2007).

In this article, I draw on ethnographic research to explore cultural struggles within a New York City community garden, illuminating the ways in which neigh- borhood and city contexts and power inequalities structure encounters and relations among a perse group of gardeners with conflicting visions. Despite the often- lauded potential of public space to build cosmopolitanism and tolerance in perse settings (see most recently Anderson 2011), the community garden under study is often a site of conflict where societal hierarchies and conflicts of gentrification are reproduced. However, it is through struggles over scarce resources and clashing visions that people engage and form ties with others across multiple categorical dif- ferences, creating some openings for resistance of existing hierarchies and a rewrit- ing of the gentrification narrative.

DIVERSITY, PUBLIC SPACE, COMMUNITY GARDENS, AND NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGE

Public space is often touted as crucial in supporting political participation, democracy, tolerance, and social change (Berman 1986; Kohn 2004; Shaftoe 2008; Young 1986). Even in gentrifying neighborhoods, old timers and their perse sup- porters come together in public spaces like community gardens and parks, building alliances to mobilize resistance (Martinez 2010; Shepard and Smithsimon 2011). Public spaces are said to build tolerance when people pided by social class, race, ethnicity, and other lines of categorical difference come into contact on city side- walks, in parks, and other urban public spaces. In a recent study that highlights this potential of public space, Anderson (2011) identified particular public spaces that serve as cosmopolitan canopies, where perse people encounter each other with tol- erance and conviviality, bracketing the ethnic and racial tensions that normally characterize city life. Similarly, a growing literature on everyday encounters in pub- lic spaces points to conviviality in the ways people routinely negotiate difference and construct fluid identities (Hall 2012; Wise and Velayutham 2009). The role of public space in building tolerance and cosmopolitanism fits within the contact the- ory framework, which postulates a positive relationship between frequency of con- tact between members of different groups and tolerance (Allport 1954; Hewstone 2009).