Surabaya is one of the second rank cities of metropolisation and one of the large regional capitals of Southeast Asia. The increasing internationalisation of its regional and urban economy has accelerated the process of metropolisation and the spatial diffusion of industrial activities, responsible for the formation of an urban corridor connecting the coast and the inland territories. Becoming more complex, this corridor tends to form an urban region which is structured by a main north-south axis and two secondary east-west axes. This process is to be related to the transformations that occur in the city centre. The emergence of this urban region is the result of tensions that occur between several spatial tendencies: strongly anchored in its regional space as the main pole of the East-Java province, Surabaya shares the role of port services provision of the eastern part of Indonesia with Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, and is a potential node for structuring shipping route patterns connecting Australia and Asia. The process of redistribution of functions between the poles of this urban region concerns essentially the production and residential roles, with the urban region broadly working still according to the centre-periphery model. However, it does foreshadow the redistribution of commanding functions, which might lead to a reorganization of the urban region towards a more polycentric pattern and modify again the position of Surabaya within the spatial systems.