The Metropolitan Question is at the center of political debates in France where most of us experience it every day: we commute for work, education, personal business, and leisure. The creation (through a national law) of a new metropolitan district on January 1st 2015 institutionalized this transformation, and in the case of Lyon, led to a territorial reconfiguration. In the United States, “metropolitan revolution” signifies drastic economic, social and spatial transformation, but no significant institutional changes in governmentality. Scholars deal with the urbanization of the suburbs and the peripheralization of the center along with the diffusion of jobs throughout a larger urbanized territory than before. This book highlights the convergence between the two scientific traditions in France and the United States in order to move the national debate beyond the common arguments over the “France of flows” and the “peripheral France”. This allows for identifying the main challenge the metropole poses: besides sharpening social and spatial inequalities, in the long run, metropolitan governmentality transforms the relationship between a centralized State and its territory. Cynthia Ghorra-Gobin Senior researcher CNRS-CREDA, professor at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 and Visiting Professor, U.C. Berkeley (Spring semester, 2015). She earned a Ph.D. in urban studies from UCLA and a doctorat d’Etat in geography from the University of Sorbonne-Paris 1. She edited the two versions of the Dictionnaire critique de la mondialisation (Paris, Armand Colin) in 2006 and in 2012.