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Résumé During the economic and social crisis of the 1970s, New Yorkers took it upon themselves to invest the urban fabric by illegally cultivating collective gardens on plots abandoned by their owners. The city government first encouraged such initiatives, since they compensated for the great lack of open space and social services, but it tried to eliminate them when the crisis started to ebb, for economic and political reasons. The gardeners managed to protect temporarily many of the 600 community gardens in the city, but their fate now depends on the capacity of their advocates to integrate them into urban planning policies in the long term, for instance thanks to the discourse on sustainable development, increasingly popular among the public as well as in city governments.