Firms and territories have a complex and ambiguous relationship. Economic dynamism is determined by more subtle criteria than those of localization geography, like cost or resources’ quality, allocations in facilities, etc. While analyzing French economic geography and its evolution through the past fifty years, Pierre Veltz focuses on this particular relationship to highlight its main logics and causes, and the diversity of situations where they take place. This finding that local development cannot be represented in a model, for it implicates social, organizational, and historical processes, raises the question of the role of the authorities in such processes.