In the summer of 2022, Morocco announced the Phase 2 completion of Zenata, a so-called ‘New Green City’ occupying 5 km of polluted coast north of Casablanca. First brought to life in 2006 at the initiative of the Moroccan King, Zenata has been celebrated as “the first African city to be awarded an Eco-City Label (ECL)”, a certification granted in 2016 during the COP 22 conference, before any ground had been broken on the site. One of several dozen ‘green’ megaprojects currently being built across the Kingdom, Zenata is a 1,9-billion-euro investment partly financed through EU loans, responsible for the forced-displacement of local informal communities on the periphery of Casablanca, and financialization of previously communally-held lands. Based on research that combines participant-observation, online ethnography, and interviews with local activists and urban planners, this paper takes a three-fold approach: I first place recent developments like Zenata in the longer timeline of state-led environmental discourses and agendas that define Morocco’s colonial and post-colonial engagements with indigenous people and nature – efforts only recently refocused on coastal cities and anchored in the financialization of urban spaces. Secondly, I use ethnography to highlight several responses from ordinary Moroccans to both envisioned and already-existing ‘green’ projects like Zenata. In this way, I foreground the profound and profoundly alternative ways in which ordinary inhabitants try to reclaim narratives about inclusion or exclusion from aspirational futures, and critique current planning regimes' orthodoxies. Finally, drawing on this ethnographic material, I aim to theorize the analytical and practical valences of 'speculative' approaches when taken outside the realm of finance capitalism and deployed as part of current struggles for social justice and access to land.