2.1. The decisive role of the territorial appropriation of high-speed rail
Many scholars have pointed out the difficulties inherent in discriminating the ‘effect’ of high-speed rail from other factors involved in economic and spatial dynamics (Adolphson & Fröidh, 2017; Martinez Sanchez-Mateos & Givoni, 2012; Mohino et al., 2014). The territorial impacts of HSR differ from one city to another (Loukaitou-Sideris, 2013) and vary according to the spatial scale of the analysis (Garmendia, Ribalaygua, & Urena, 2012; Menerault, Urena, & Garmendia, 2009; Urena, Coronado, Garmendia, & Romero, 2012), the general economic context, ‘the physical, economic and locational circumstances and the HSR services characteristics’ (Mohino et al., 2014). Because railway stations are both nodes of transport networks and urban places (Bertolini, 1996; Bertolini & Spit, 1998), the economic and spatial effects of high-speed rail stations depend on the interactions between numerous factors. These factors include: the characteristics of HSR services (frequency, destination and type of services) and national and regional accessibility by train (Bertolini, 2008; Mohino et al., 2014; Willigers & Van Wee, 2011), the efficiency of intermodal connection (Conticelli, 2011; Facchinetti-Mannone, Carrouet, & Berion, 2016; Tapiador, Burchhart, & Marti-Henneberg, 2009), the location of the HSR station (Adolphson & Fröidh, 2017; De Jong, 2009; Facchinetti-Mannone, 2009; Givoni, 2006; Martinez Sanchez-Mateos & Givoni, 2012) and the specificities of served areas. These specificities include the size of the city, its position in the urban hierarchy (Urena, Ribalaygua, Coronado, Escobedo, & Garmendia, 2006, 2012), ‘pre-existing economic and land market conditions’ (Loukaitou-Sideris, Cuff, Higgins, & Linovsky, 2012), the diversity of economic activities (Bertolini, 1999) as well as supportive urban planning and economic strategies.
These strategies have a major influence on the successful integration between railway nodes and cities (Bellet, Alonso, & Gutierrez, 2012; Conticelli, 2011; Loukaitou-Sideris et al., 2012; Vickerman, 2015; f.i). Many scientific studies have shown that the infrastructure and the new conditions of accessibility are, ultimately, only development opportunities that territorial actors need to grasp by means of accompanying measures and appropriate development strategies. Appropriation is thus recognized as a condition in the success of the territorial development projects which started with the commissioning of a new transport infrastructure. Taking the example of the North European high-speed line, Menerault has clearly shown that the territorial changes linked with the improvement in rail accessibility closely depend on the national, regional and local modes of appropriation of the high-speed rail service (Menerault, 1996, 1997, 2000). Several scholars (Bazin, Beckerich, & Delaplace, 2010; Delaplace, 2017; Feliu, 2012; Loukaitou-Sideris et al., 2012; Peters, 2009) have highlighted that the collective appropriation of the HSR service and the ability of actors to collaborate are key to the emergence of the positive ‘effects’ of the infrastructure. In order to understand how the territory appropriates the new transport supply, several works have focused on the actors’ strategies and logics (Blanquart, Joignaux, & Vaillant, 2010; Chaplain, 1994; Cohou, 2000). For instance, Ribalaygua (2006) conducted a detailed analysis of enhancement strategies adopted to anticipate, support and promote the arrival of high-speed rail in small-sized Spanish cities. As Chaplain (1994) demonstrated in her PhD dissertation on the Channel Tunnel and the French Northern high-speed line, understanding of the behaviors and practices that accompanied the infrastructure project, from conception to completion, is essential to analyze territorial dynamics.
In accordance with these reflections and in the continuity of studies devoted to the influence of the choices of station location on the territorial integration of HSR (Bertolini, 1998; Loukaitou-Sideris et al., 2012; Mohino et al., 2014), our own previous research on HSR stations (Facchinetti-Mannone, 2012, 2016; Facchinetti-Mannone & Bavoux, 2010) reveals that the process of territorialization of HSR has encountered a certain territorial inertia due as much to ‘the effects of place’ as to the appropriation modes of the new transport supply by territorial actors. If, as Delaplace pointed out, ‘appropriation depends on factors such as station location and the strategy implemented by local stakeholders’ (Delaplace, 2017), the degree of appropriation of the potentials of HSR has been a major factor in the involvement of local actors in the decision-making process leading to the choice of the location of HSR stations, and in the implementation of coherent and coordinated strategies improving the territorial integration of HSR. When local actors anticipate the opportunities offered by connection to the HSR network, not only do they actively work toward obtaining a station location in compliance with their territorial development projects, but they also implement measures to strengthen the territorial integration of the high-speed rail service (Facchinetti-Mannone, 2016). Focusing on the locations of stations, these analyses suggest the existence of different modes of appropriation which vary according to the degree of centrality of the railway stations, the mobilization of local actors confronted with the transport operators’ supra-territorial logic and the temporal context of the HSR project implementation. These diffe...
