Paris has increasingly sacrificed public open spaces in lower-income areas for social housing construction. Open spaces that remain in the city consist of traditionally manicured, municipality-managed, tourist-centric parks and gardens with strict norms and few permitted activities. However, at one public open space the city targeted for development and began building on, known as the TEP Ménilmontant, a community mobilized against the construction and informally occupied the site. This paper asks how the community occupation, management, and use of the TEP challenge Paris’ current restricted approach to planning public space. As the TEP seeks longevity in the face of their precarious status on the land, this paper envisions how their permanence might be ensured without the typical co-optation, subjugation, and limitations community-managed spaces oft undergo. Through participant observation and interviews with the TEP’s main volunteers and community members, I have found that the TEP is combatting Paris’ development-first planning approach through its claim for permanence, collective decision-making, resource leveraging, mutual aid, and flexible land uses. Municipal officials in support of the TEP cite the surrounding area’s density and the ecological need for green space as reasons against municipal development. I argue that the robust social infrastructure of the TEP asserts a more radical reason: the benefits of collective management and shaping of public space, which include the TEP’s uniquely high social diversity and strong network of community care and commitment. This community strength is lost when spaces are eliminated or softened in their radical acts by municipalities that prioritize capitalist relations of land use. Therefore, Paris must create an opening in its planning framework, as no solution to adequately sustain the TEP project currently exists within it. This project proposes a new land designation of “Protected Community Space,” which relinquishes decision-making power to the community without them having to Johansson 4 purchase the land, and does not detail physical land use specifications. “Protected Community Space” is an envisioned application of zoning for land management outside of capitalist relations.