However, as shown particularly in research on gentrification, public space can also be exclusionary, with urban elites attempting to control its use through design, surveillance, and outright privatization (Kohn 2004; Shepard and  Smithsimon  2011; Smith 1996; Zukin 2010). More broadly, there is no guarantee that public space encounters are convivial and build tolerance. Rather, fleeting encounters may reinforce prejudices and animosities, or people may fail to engage with each other  at all (Amin 2002; Lofland 2000). Valentine (2008) criticizes the rosy picture painted by some ethnographic research on everyday urban encounters for its failure to con- textualize public space within broader structures of inequality, which results in opti- mistic but superficial portrayals of public space interactions (see also Wise 2010). To complicate the matter, not all public space is the same, particularly if we embrace Shepard and Smithsimon’s (2011:18) broad definition of public space as space where people can interact with many unfamiliar others in the course of vari- ous public and private activities. Among such spaces, particular social patterns, contours of control, and physical infrastructure result in different outcomes in terms of potential for fostering democracy, community engagement, solidarity, or other positively valued outcomes commonly associated with public space. For instance, in dealing specifically with dilemmas of ethnic and racial persity, Amin (2002) points out that places that best disrupt existing categories and animosities are those where people come together for a common purpose, having to negotiate through differ- ence. Along with workplaces, youth centers, and sports clubs, Amin identifies com- munal gardens as such “micro-publics.”

Thus, community gardens are public spaces that hold potential for unsettling categories and encouraging tolerance, a crucial function in contexts of gentrification and immigration-fueled persity. At the same time, it is important to note that the process of cultural disruption that leads to transcendence  of accepted categories  and hierarchies reveals itself in disagreement and deliberation rather than convivial- ity and consensus (Amin 2002). Disagreement and deliberation, however, are more often found in accounts of what happens between community gardens and the forces allied against them, rather than in the internal dynamics of these gardens. Most scholarly literature, as well as public accounts, presents harmonious, if not outright utopian, portraits of community gardens (Birky and Strom 2013; L’An- nunziata 2010; Lawson 2005; Salpar-Tanaka and Krasny 2004; Schmelzkopf 1995; Staeheli, Mitchell, and Gibson 2002). There are exceptions. In her study of community gardens of the Lower East Side, Martinez (2010) describes the conflicts in how people in formally organized, orderly “artist gardens” and those in Puerto Rican, community-oriented “casita gardens” understood the purpose of garden space. These visions had much to do with what gardeners expected from each other and how they experienced the larger neighborhood and its boundaries and norms of interaction. Similarly, Eizenberg (2013) describes three distinct types of gardens across New York City as Puerto Rican, African American, and gentrifier, each with different practices and visions. Zukin (2010) develops a developmental typology of gardens with a progression from garden as social movement to garden as site of local and sustainable food production, and notes that immigration-driven persity can bring conflict. Even these studies, however, emphasize differences between gar- dens, rather than examining the ways in which larger contexts of gentrification and persity play out within a particular garden.

Yet, research on neighborhood gentrification would lead us to expect conflicts over the use of community garden space by gardeners, and not simply between gar- deners and their adversaries. Like other public spaces, community gardens are affected by the cultural and economic storms of gentrification raging outside their gates. The cultural agenda of gentrification, couched in seemingly neutral terms of aesthetic order, affects visual and behavioral aspects of community gardens (Zukin 1995, 1998). High-end property development and concomitant influx of affluent  new residents can result in enforcement of new norms of sociality in public space (Smith 1996). For instance, Chaskin and Joseph (2013) report concerns over people congregating in groups for leisure, playing loud music, and drinking alcohol in pub- lic parks in a mixed-income development in Chicago. Writing about a different Chi- cago neighborhood, Patillo (2007) describes efforts to eliminate sidewalk care repair and barbecuing in parks. The censoring and even criminalization of such public behaviors are also reported by Freeman (2006) in two gentrifying New York neigh- borhoods. Owners of property adjacent to community gardens are anxious about   the appearance of these public spaces and conduct of their users, because they can have an effect on property values (Voicu and Been 2008). Given these observations, a community garden in a gentrifying neighborhood is especially likely to experience conflicts over what it should look like and how people should behave in it, in addi- tion to disagreements over access, relations with the community, and organizational structure and resources.