During the last six years, the inter-municipal administration Bordeaux Métropole has revised itsland-use plan. It has been fabricated through translations from strategical document framed asaiming at sustainable development. Graphically, the plan is a myriad of signs, colors, letters,numbers, lines, and boxes. Hull (2012: 5) writes that “a planning map is not only an ideologicalprojection of a bureaucratic vision of the city; this vision is embedded in the technical andprocedural processes that link a map to roads, streams, and documents”. In a similar vein, Ielaborate on the politics embedded in the land-use plan by inquiring its material qualities andhow it is employed in building permit procedures. I draw on my ongoing fieldwork of encounterswith public servants, councilors, urbanists and residents in various ways involved with themaking and employing of the plan. Conceived through the ambition to enhance theagglomeration’s attractivity on European level (l’échelle européenne), the plan has been madethrough interaction between two administrative levels (la double échelle); metropole and local.While the multiple scales corresponding to various actors’ interests and desires are constantlynegotiated in land-use issues, scales are generated through the existing and envisioned urbanpractices and environments which the plan mediates. I intend with this presentation to shedattention to the multiplicity of a ‘city scale’ which has become nominated a setting in whichglobal climate change concerns are to be dealt with.