On a rainy day in May 2007, the mayor of Paris inaugurated the Jardins d' ole, a park whose completion was hailed internationally as an exemplar of sustainable urbanism. The park was the result of a hard-fought, decadelong protest movement in a low-income Maghrebi and African immigrant district starved for infrastructure, but the Mayor's vision of urban sustainability was met with jeers. Drawing extensively from immersive, firsthand ethnographic...