ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses sustainable development governance at the urban scale by focusing on urban metabolism in France. A city functions through the inflow and outflow of material elements in cycles largely transcending its institutional boundaries. The management of these cycles of matter and energy depends on the logics and strategies of different actors, and therefore of more or less explicit social choices. It also impacts spaces that may be defined as socio-ecosystems, whose evolutions are linked to the city and its development. Achieving sustainable development therefore means being able to monitor these cycles to meet sustainability standards. In this context, the author more specifically asks to what extent city leaders have integrated such requirements in their own practices and representations. The contribution seeks to determine what political orientations and what instruments of knowledge and management are consciously used by city leaders in the search for sustainable development. It suggests that, on the whole, the origins and conditions of production of incoming elements are little known and that the possibilities for large-scale evolution are limited by the domination of the current socio-economic model and its habitual constraints.
