Planned at the moment of its launch in 2008 by the government, as an attempt of redefining the priority guidelines of the urban area, with the clear objective of replacing the French capital to the rank of world-cities, the metropolitan project carried by the Grand Paris appears as a major change in the planning practices of the Paris region. This institutional complexity, which appears as an important source of conflicts and slowness in terms of public policies, allows explaining the multiplicity of actors, interests and procedures which articulates the construction of the Grand Paris. It justifies the interest to integrate this question into a wider reflection, which accounts for the intricacy of the administrative levels involved in the management of territorial planning as well as the confuse distribution of assignments. It implies, to well measure the scope of the subject, taking into account the urban area of Paris, as it is the capital-region, has a singular status in the national context.

This paper proposes studying the construction process of the Grand Paris as an applicative example of the strategic spatial planning methods, decisive in the determining bend taken by the management of the Paris region development. At the center of a media and political debate, the Grand Paris topic is blurred by the quantity of news and opinions which are continuously spread, made misted in the complex interaction between the stakes of public interest and divergent wills – essentially political – of the numerous actors.

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