The paper investigates the connections between culture and territory, based on two cultural public policies comprising a territorial approach: the public libraries (France) and the cultural centers (French-speaking Belgium). It tackles how these operators are reconfigured by their wider framework: the metropolisation in the French case, and the 2013 decree for the cultural centers in the French-speaking Belgian case. How does the territorial prospective implemented in these processes contribute to change the contents and the actions? How does it contribute to mobilize the local partners around common concerns and objectives? And how, eventually, does the cultural action resulting from these legal framework shape, in return, the territory, creating and developing the latter as a promise? The article is based on two different approaches: one from a sociology researcher and grounded on data collected during an investigation conducted in the cultural department of a French metropolis. The second is from the director of a cultural center in Brussels, analyzing the implementation of the decree from a first-hand field experience point of view. Using the concepts of hard and soft spaces (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2007 ; 2008 ; 2009 ; 2010), the study investigates the dynamics of the two institutions, in relation with their territorial actors. The analysis of each of the cases is organized following the questions mentioned above, and a summation then highlights the salient features of the comparison. Common traits between the French and the Belgian cases include: 1. The future territory as an orientation for the actions to undertake; 2. The present territory to be mobilized as an ensemble of actors; 3. A territory structured by global policies, to be adapted to each specific situation; 4. A decompartmentalized conception of culture, envisioned with mandatory connections to actors in other fields in the local territory. Dissimilarities include: 1. Object of the territorial action: populations in Belgium, collective ...