Cultural action and planning have been linked in recent years in a competitive and attractive way, through work on the creative city and the place of cultue and art in economic requalification. In this article, we want to consider cultural actions as contributing to a sensitive development of territories, focusing more on art, emotions and knowledge, based on actions localized and contextualized, and finally focus less on dedicated equipment and more on multiform experiences and initiatives. The qualitative method aimed at an analysis of eighty interviews conducted on the dynamics between territorial development and cultural actions in three French territorial contexts: weakly urbanized territories (project territories), medium-sized city (Albi), regional metropolis (Toulouse). Two main vectors are identified from a variety of case studies in favor of such a sensitive development. On the one hand, cultural territorialization which overlaps cultural and territorial issues, giving a fundamental place to local singularities. In this process of territorialization, local development operations clearly integrate culture as a lever for action. On the other hand, the decompartmentalization and opening up of the local actor system which reveals new skills at work in the projects, greater transversality of actions, and new profiles of stakeholders: social organizations, residents’ associations, or cooperative of cultural actors. These evolutions are discreet and fragile because they are based more on a few individual wishes and implications than on institutional and collective logics. Finally, it seems that two perspectives are needed to promote this sensitive development: in the political agenda as in research methods, still often very compartmentalized in the disciplines.