Under what conditions can a big urban project be locally sustained in the era of austerity ? The wakening of the metropolitan actors after a decade of crisis and dormant planning, reviving a project both as image and discourse, reconciling private and public interests, but with neither operational capacity nor financial room for manoeuvre, altogether creates a paradox. A set of theoretical tools (infrastructural functionalism,the actors’resources,soft spaces) help understand the reasons for the survival of a project that can never be implemented. While they expose two ways of legitimizing decisions, the authors reconstruct the dissymmetry in the protagonists’capacities for action, discuss the shift in powerrelations, explain the frictions that arise from them. The result is as follows: the project is shrinking, but nothing changes fundamentally, except its spatial substance. The project’s intention is not oriented towards the regeneration of marginal and deprived northern districts. It envisages a mystified metropolitan periphery as a new frontier which could integrate and resolve all opposition and contradictions among Madrid planners.