Visions of Public Space: Reproducing and Resisting Social Hierarchies in a Diverse Community Garden

• In Event: 476 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Paper Session. Challenges to Community Social Organization in a Changing America

Abstract

How do people share public spaces in contexts of diversity? In order to capture the lived experience of diversity, I focus on one public space, rather than analyzing residential patterns or relations between particular groups. I move beyond fleeting encounters and civility to study the conflicting ways of imagining shared spaces that underlie everyday interaction. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a community garden in a gentrifying and superdiverse New York neighborhood, I examine how disagreements about what a public space should look like, and how people should act while there, articulate with larger social hierarchies and power structures. I find that despite everyday civility and common displays of conviviality across multiple lines of categorical difference, structural inequalities are reproduced. The most privileged gardeners successfully enact their vision of the community garden, which aligns with cultural consumption preferences symptomatic of gentrifying neighborhoods. At the same time, less privileged gardeners are sometimes able to disrupt social hierarchies and destabilize social relations and cultural understandings. In resisting, they draw on social ties formed in the garden across divisions of class, race, ethnicity, immigration, age, and disability. The findings have implications for urban public space in general, and for conditions of diversity in particular.

Author

• Sofya Aptekar, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity