Faced with intensifying attractiveness issues (economic, tourist and more broadly at the societal level) and given accelerated polarization phenomena benefiting major cities, many territories find themselves on the sidelines, with a declining economy, an aging population and, the highlight, a real deficit of the future. In this context, it is a new territorial gives possible? How can public communication help give meaning and direction to the community? What signs of change can it bring? The situation of the city of Saint-Etienne will be taken as an example, with a problematic picture, initially, despite a long industrial and human history, and undeniably creative approach to give shape and meaning to a genuine territorial project. An example of a comprehensive, structural and strategic variables that shape an identity, impel a movement, promote what could be defined as a conversion of the gaze on a city territory. We will give the city of Saint-Etienne and testimonial value paradigm, seeking to define, more generally, the main lines of research on the region's attractiveness and the emergence of what one defines sometimes as "creative metropolis". Not a public communication device that would seduction of the metaphor and little basis in reality, but a thorough examination of the potential of a territory, its ability to boost its image, as required by the change. A picture, that is to say, a certain vision of the world and, frankly, the promise of life forms that shape the territory in the imagination of all stakeholders, political, economic, cultural and citizens who chosen to live there and stay there. The semiotic approach therefore leads to demonstrate the link between the gestalt as a logo, and the form of life that proposes or prefigures a City.