In two and a half centuries Concepción went from colonial city to metropolization. Though this metropolization remains quite limited, since the urban area does not exceed 700-800 000 inhabitants, it nevertheless links the contemporary Grand Concepción to the market in a world that is now globalized. Four cultural and ideological forms of development representations have followed one another in this southern part of central Chile since the middle of the 18th Century : the colonial and postcolonial Frontier ; the industrial city of the strategic development area (aimed at replacing imports by national productions) ; the region fitting into a neoliberal economy imposed and controlled by the military dictatorship ; the mobile metropolis, partly converted to the service sector and to consumerism, but drowned under the mystifying discourse of sustainable development that the prevailing seismic risk tends to make into a mythologize. Using the method of socio-spatial formations and through the lens of successive representations of development, this research tries to throw light on the varied reasoning that led to the territorial construction of a network-linked metropolitan area, globalized but doing little to give its region direction.