Maritime industry transformations force ports to redefine their scope of activities and has an impact on the new trajectories of governance marked by a new level of complexity which has caused a reshaping of the actors' system involved in the organization of ports. Models of port governance commonly consider the "public sector" to be a homogeneous object. But, its variety, the functions it performs and how it is linked with each other actor in the port are not so much analysed. So, the paper aims to provide some insights into this question. Moreover, the development of port activity echoes in the regional economy as well, hence governance is essential to maximizing the impact of ports on their region's economic development. The territory may be a resource for the port and its development. Correspondingly, the port is involved in urban/regional development. Likewise, the paper also seeks to identify the characteristics, constraints and dynamics of the relationship between ports and cities and to study their potential impacts on territorial development. It specifically focuses on an intermediate scale of port-cities. The methodology of this paper is primarily qualitative: interviews are conducted among key actors in ports. Collected speeches are the subject of a content analysis and a statistical treatment of textual data. The study mainly focuses on interrogations about the institutional status of the ports, the issues and consequences of the choices or the role of each category of actors (private /public for instance) in port and/or city governance.