Public leaders face a set of crisis management tasks that are not easy to fulfill. It becomes especially challenging in large cities, which bring together potentially dangerous technologies and large masses of people. Coping with an
emerging crisis in this context is a daunting task, if only because of infrastructural bottle necks and a lack of available means. What answers do city governments produce? For a particular interesting development, we turn to a group of French large cities which have seen the emergence of a new form of risk management: the integrated risk institute. In this article, we briefly survey emerging developments and challenges in these cities and formulate questions for a research agenda on urban crisis management.