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The policy for towns is based on a priority geography made up of districts. These latter cover an astonishing urban and social diversity, but any description of such diversity fails to clarify the bonds linking them together. It is then necessary to look at the successive layers of decisions which governed the composition of this priority geography, and so to understand that it results from a series of procedures in matters of choice, divisions and definition. These have now in turn created tension in both the locality understood as a complex area, and in the territory understood as an area invested by some institutional action. Such tension, the reason for the policy for towns, is exerted by using a series of instruments for territorial production: division, choice of indicators, creation of indices, etc. It also shows that the history of the policy for towns was never a continuous process, but on the contrary was marked by as many changes in direction and in the understanding of the stakes at issue, as there have been production stages in the priority geography. In total, it is the piling up of these modes of divisions and the changes in direction, which constitute the real originality of the policy for towns, and perhaps its exemplary nature when compared to the general evolution of public policies.