Experiments on sustainable city or neighborhood accompanied by the search for new modes of design, governance, management and plan-ning of the city. The thesis proposes to study the emergence of an innovation based on so-called 'sustainable' from the tools and instruments which will equip participants to manage these new situations. Four types of instrumentation are considered in the thesis: legal (contracts between the parties); Economic and Financial (financial engineering development projects / ACG), governance and management (repositories, project management and process) design and evaluation performance of the district or area con-sidered (these tools and templates that can be quantitative and qualitative). This systematic analysis has not yet been carried out in the literature. It is therefore a theoretical issue. It is also an empirical issue because design patterns are planning to conceive, a synoptic view is a key issue for actors, public or private, who wish to contribute to this new integrative function. For this, the thesis is based on two approaches: - A historical perspective of the logic of development to show the changes brought about by sustainability issues and challenges of this new feature; - An empirical analysis and comparative depth of experience innova-tive in France and abroad. Our goal is to answer two research questions: What are the instruments, collective reasoning and collective experiments that support in-novantes current in terms of sustainable management? What are the attributes of the function of sustainable (parallel with the 'innovation function')?
