Sofya Aptekar, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity
Sharing public space: everyday interactions in a superdiverse neighborhood
In increasingly diverse global cities, multiple groups share scarce public spaces in dense urban
neighborhoods. Under conditions of superdiversity (Vertovec 2007), there are not simply
various ethnoracial or immigrant groups, but a complex intersection of legal statuses,
transnational connections, and class positions. This complexity is manifested in everyday
negotiations that take place over the use of shared public space, and necessitates a move away
from traditional methodological approaches that depart from a focus on one or two particular
ethnic groups.
In this paper, I present results of a longterm ethnographic study of a superdiverse neighborhood
in New York City. This neighborhood, Astoria, is characterized by multiple waves of
international migration, recent internal migration, racial segregation, gentrification, and extreme
socioeconomic and ethnic diversification. First settled by Dutch and Germans in the 19th
century, it experienced several waves of immigration from Italy, overlapping with several later
waves of immigration from Greece. Still a focal point of the Greek American community,
Astoria has seen immigration from dozens of countries in the past decade, including Mexico,
Bangladesh, Japan, Brazil, and Croatia. No one group comes close to dominating numerically.
Recent local development projects have brought luxury housing and affluent, mostly white and
native-born (yet from outside New York City) residents, who live in close proximity to a 60 year
old public housing development that is predominantly African American and Hispanic.
Public space – such as parks, playgrounds, street markets, community gardens, and libraries – is
scarce and shared among the many kinds of residents of the neighborhood. Drawing on two
years of ethnographic research in the neighborhood, I examine the everyday practices of
negotiating difference in public space. How do people manage conflicting norms of public
behavior and different visions for the public space? How do these conflicts and negotiation
around these conflicts connect to larger structures of inequality locally and globally? What room
for resistance to social hierarchies exists under conditions of superdiversity and in public space
in particular?
I construct a typology of public space associated with different patterns of everyday lived
diversity, identifying conditions under which people engage with those different from them and
conditions conducive to exclusion, parallel lives, and conflict. I find that the community garden,
with its bounded physical space, sense of outside threat, and a common – if contested – purpose
is the public space most favorable to the formation of enduring ties across lines of difference,
and democratic negotiation of conflicts and disagreements. This is in contrast to the market,
where a more superficial conviviality prevails; a library, where space-specific ties combine with
reproduction of social categories; an ethnically themed park, where people conduct parallel lives;
and a sculpture park that operates to exclude.