After providing an overview of the French welfare regime and structure of urban governance, this chapter focuses on four city-regions in France with regard to both their socio-economic and political features. In all the cases considered, while social inequalities are deepening due to the transformation of job markets, territorial disparities are evolving much more slowly, even if they have widened in the last years. The chapter explores how central State transfers and local public spending still manage to compensate for the growing territorial inequalities. It concludes by stressing the role that metropolitan governments might play henceforth in the correction of socio-spatial inequalities, following a gradual withdrawal of the State from local affairs.