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At the beginning of the twentieth century, it appeared that the new technology of radio would be able to challenge the supremacy of underwater cables, and thus the English, in trans-Atlantic telecommunications. It should be noted, however, that many of the hopes raised by this innovation were the direct result of a skilful campaign launched by Marconi. The concerns of those in cable, who over-estimated the potential of radio, contributed to raising the value of the new technique, which the English did not even bother mastering. Nothing really changed until the beginning of the 1920s, when radiotelegraphy began suddenly to upset the British order of things. In place of a former geostrategic framework were substituted new sets of rules in which innovation, rather than the mastery of physical space, constituted the key to international leadership. This new geostrategic paradigm, shaped by the Americans, is still in many respects the basis for present-day international rivalries.

The history of the concept of network should not be confused with that of "network" objects. At the beginning of the 19th century, with Saint-Simon, the history of the network concept was tied to ideas of flow and organic totality; at the end of the same century, network enterprises, particularly in electricity, invented a new paradigm around the principles of web and universal service. The network economy was born. After the Second World War, network became synonymous with information commutator, as high-speed connections liberated from spatial requirements were made possible. Today, the network is an idealized form of transactional management and a tool in decentralized co-ordination. Aside from its semantic ambiguity, networks have no inherent vocation for overwhelming size. When networks develop, they may be either intensive or extensive; they may respect institutional boundaries or create their own functional space. But metaphors of the tentacular octopus or the spider inexorably building its web do not hold up to historical analysis. The notion of the Large Technical System, on the other hand, does bring up the question of necessary and uncontrollable growth. Behind the critique of size, is it not rather the types and modalities of control of these networks-LTS which come under question? Centralized or self-managed networks set up différents sorts of questions for both networkers and networking.

Highways in the form of belts, loops and other bypasses have been built around and through Spanish cities since the 1950s. Since the middle of the 70s, principles of functional segregation may be observed with respect to these roads. Their circulatory dimension has been emphasized, and the concepters, incapable of reconciling speed, safety and the connection with the surroundings, have tried to limit the constraints which result in the areas where these roads are built, by progressively pushing the bypass further and further out from the center. In spite of the distance, and the ban on residents using bypasses, urban extension has shown a tendency to develop in the direction of the bypasses more than elsewhere, with growth rates generally higher outside the bypass than between the bypass and the city. It can then be observed, near bypasses and more particularly around the interchanges providing access to the center, the phenomenon of completely new kinds of urban models which are both original and functionally specialized, whose major charactersitic is a formal independence, not only with respect to the order of the city, but also with respect to the road.