The paper discusses the validity of the idea that Culture can be a way to give to the urban sustainable development a new orientation based on the integration of habits, memory and representations. Culture in general and especially the living culture are a lever of the urban transformation and a patrimonial activator, a source of socio-economic development which can bring dynamism, contemporaneousness and attractiveness to the city. As it is thought and applied today, the principle of the sustainable development is essentially technical. The risk of this position is that the intangible heritage will be lost for the future generation. Thus, it would be interesting to take account of the couple “culture / heritage” in the dynamics of the sustainable development. Integrating the living culture could heighten the identity sense as well as the social usage of the public places to which is linked the memory. A « cultural turn » of the sustainable development would give an heuristic legitimacy to what constructs the memory of a district, not only the remarkable buildings, but also the habits and the stories of ordinary inhabitants. It includes the life style, the collective practices and gives a great importance to the representations, to imagination and to speeches. This paper advocates for a development involving a bigger consciousness of the memory shared by people and which constitute them in an organized community.