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This article presents the paradigm of urban organization in the form of networks. This paradigm provides, for each type of metropolitan area, the economic and territorial foundation for certain important normative principles: polycentric organization, based on the development of specificities in each secondary center; functional and infrastructural integration of different centers into one single programmatic frame which makes it possible to avoid costly and inefficient duplications of functions and competition among secondary centers; the amelioration of infrastructuration in a non-radial direction. The rationale behind the organisation of urban centers in networks directly conflicts with the model of rational-synoptic planning, whereas it shares numerous affinities with the new models of strategic planning. This latter type of planning model works in a more pragmatic dimension of continuous verification of the coherence between objectives and results; it relies upon repetitive processes of comprehension, evaluation, and revision of objectives; it interacts with private interests and public solidarity, thus encouraging public/private partnerships along with associative partnerships between governments at the same level, and at different levels.

Since the early 1980s the UK utilities sector has been radically restructured through the privatisation of the water, energy and telecommunications networks. Each city and region now has its own unique patchwork of private, and often competing, utility networks. This paper examines a number of trends which indicate that there are disturbing socio-economic and spatial differences in levels of access to these essential utility services. The problem of fuel poverty has now been joined by the new phenomenon of water poverty and increasing concern about low levels of access to the telephone. These variations in access have important environmental social, health and economic development implications at the local level. These trends may force local authorities to take greater interest in levels of access to utility services which may stimulate new types of local policy response to privatised utilities.

The question of accessibility may be approached using two complementary processes: namely, multipolarity and unipolarity. In this article, we first approach multipolarity by using transportation systems and considering all links over a given time period between pairs of cities within a certain network. This leads to anamorphosis, which is the expression of the territory-network relationship and its eventual modifications. We then study unipolarity: concentrating on an origin-city, the local variants of links between this city and the other cities of the network under consideration are worked out. The resulting cartographic representations translate the relationship between cities and their territory.

The road system is used here to support an interrogation on the relationship between networks and territory. A first approach concentrates on the legal classification of roads, making it possible to situate each level of road within its territorial context, with reference to the reasons why the road was built and the principles of its development. This analysis shows that, whereas national highways and the main thoroughfares in each département do indeed constitute networks, this does not hold for community-level roads, whose functions are primarily internal with respect to neighborhoods, and may be represented on the scale of their territory of reference as groups of disjointed segments. A second, complementary approach, consists in giving more emphasis to a particular territory (built-up areas) in order to demonstrate how the roads are structured. The imbrication of different levels of roads then appears as a rule, resulting in high connectivity to the network. Nonetheless, the mixed nature of the traffic which is produced creates disfunctions, and this slowly leads to the setting up of "limited imbrication."