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The large urban projects, which can be defined as territorial mobilisation processes that aim at activating transformations of the physical shape, the economy and the image of cities in a context of inter-urban competition, are decisive phenomena to look at in order to understand the recent changes in the governance of European cities. First, as analysis units, urban projects reveal a process of pluralisation of the urban political spaces, characterised by the opening of urban agendas, the multiplication of the number of actors involved in urban policymaking and the dispersion of resources. Second, as policy instruments, they consent to understand how the actors involved in urban policies take benefit of these pluralist situations and how they can reconstitute a collective political capacity with interactionist and incremental policy tools.