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 power-relations, 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.