Public transports, political regulation and territorial contradictions. Grenoble and Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing. (Jean-Jacques Chapoutot, p. 94-119) Significant measures have been decided by the state to solve the general crisis of urban transportation, concerning its financing (settlement of a transportation-allowance) and its managing institutions. The sphere of state and state-agents intervention , as far as public transports are concerned, is getting more complex nowadays : it is necessary to deal with local governing bodies and transports users as well as with transport departments managers. What motives made the local governing bodies join this new system, which meant at the same time having more responsibilities but also assuming extra expenses ? On what terms are the local governing bodies bearing this new part of theirs : political orientation of public transports ? As a matter of fact, the policies determined by the local governing bodies are quite differentiated, and linked to strategies concerning the whole of the urban structure. The joint labor union of public transports in Grenoble's urban centre is lightly structured, and has little authority on the manager of transport departments, facing the commune's very often contradictory requirements. First, the social division of space (industrial derealizations, restructuration of labor concentrations) is indispensable for local governing bodies. Then, the socio-economical stakes in urban space (functioning of the centre, urban outskirts structuring) contain some requirements that are hardly reconcilable as regards roadssystem policy and public transports. Thus, differences between the "commune-centre" and the " suburbian communes " as to the future of the urban centre mark the limits of the intercommunal policy, and consequently the limits of the transports policy. In another connection, the stade-created Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing urban community assumes all the technical tasks of the urban centre's territorial management. It seems that this institution con¬ trols all the elements of public transports policy. Yet it does not have the political attributions to cope with the metropolitan scale of problems. The urban community's policy, particularly when it participates in road-schemes of national interest. The urban community's specific difficulty in defining a specific utilisation project of public transports lies in the way it generally intervenes on urban planning problems. The social division of community space (a depressed area — Roubaix-Tourcoing — and the Lille pole, where programmed equipments concentrate) has no real political representation within the urban community. This might help to understand the parcelling of conflicts between punctual objectives, and to appreciate how big a stake the "power" of planning is for the community institution.