Spatial Implications and Planning Criteria for High-Speed Rail Cities and Regions

José Maria de Ureña, Chia-Lin Chen, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Roger Vickerman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367673604
• eBook ISBN: 9781000370850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Spatial Implications and Planning Criteria for High-speed Rail Cities and Regions evaluates the varied experiences that HSR systems have brought about to different station-cities and their regional territories around the world, with an eye towards better future planning and policy of such systems.

This edited volume draws from examples of high-speed rail operations in different cities in Europe and Asia to depict the various impacts of this major transportation infrastructure. It attempts to distinguish the short- and long-term impacts described in the literature, classifying them into regional and inter-urban effects, urban effects, and wider economic impacts. Planning challenges appear at two major points: 1) during the initial planning stage that includes the route and location of stations; and 2) during the development process that follows.

The case studies in the book concentrate on a variety of topics from the impact of high-speed rail on population growth in some station-cities, to the regional economic impacts that an HSR system can bring about to the larger territories it passes through, to the potential of station-cities to better attract firms, or to experience increases in tourism and commerce. They also assess planning strategies and experiences from station-cities to draw lessons for future HSR planning policies.

The Chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of European Planning Studies.

A methodological approach to analyze the territorial appropriation of high-speed rail from interactions between actions and representations of local actors

Valerie Facchinetti-Mannone

ABSTRACT
Because it is difficult to separate the specific transport impact from other factors influencing economic and spatial development, the focus in research is increasingly on understanding the process by which territorial changes occur in order to explain how economic and social agents and local authorities have appropriated new transportation systems. This appropriation plays a crucial part in territorial dynamics. The diversity of economic and spatial changes produced by high-speed rail indicates the existence of multiple modes of appropriation which vary according to the location of stations, the mobilization of local stakeholders confronted with the transport operators’ logic and the geographical and historical context of the infrastructure implementation. Appropriation is defined as a dialogical identity process that must be explained to better understand the gradual and mutual adjustments between the transportation system and the territory. After specifying the issues involve in an analysis of the appropriation of high-speed rail, the article adopts an analytical framework inspired by Brunel and Roux‘s research work on consumer habits in order to explain how appropriation has gradually taken shape over the various stages of a high-speed line project.

1. Introduction

The complex interdependencies between transport, society and territory make it difficult to dissociate the effects of a transport infrastructure from other factors involved in economic and spatial changes (Banister & Lichfield, 1995; Plassard, 2003). Faced with the great diversity of territorial implications of high-speed rail (HSR) and in response to the difficulties in discriminating the specific transport impact from other factors influencing economic and spatial development (Adolphson & Fröidh, 2017; Martinez Sanchez-Mateos & Givoni, 2012; Mohino, Loukaitou-Sideris, & Urena, 2014), researchers are now focusing more on understanding the process by which territorial changes occur. Instead of inquiring into the ‘effects’ of the new transport supply on spatial organization, it is more instructive to consider the territory as a whole in order to analyze how it has generated the infrastructure, how it has adjusted to the new conditions of accessibility and how economic and social agents and local authorities have appropriated the new transportation system through their behaviours, practices and representations (Chaplain, 1994; Delaplace, 2017; Plassard, 2003). Although it is clear that the appropriation of HSR plays a crucial part in territorial dynamics, it remains necessary to decipher its mechanisms in order to better understand territorial reconfigurations linked to the arrival of high-speed rail.

Appropriation designates either the act of taking something for oneself or the act of making something correspond to the use for which it is intended. It is defined as a dialogical identity process that must be explained in order to facilitate the understanding of the gradual and mutual adjustments between the transportation system and the territory. As Delaplace has pointed out (2017), appropriation is a collective construction process resulting from the multiple interactions between the agents involved in the territorialization of the HSR system. Moreover, appropriation is a long-term evolutionary process (De Vaujany, 2003) begun long before the implementation of the new infrastructure and continuing even after the trivialization of its uses. The purpose of this paper is to understand how the appropriation of HSR is constructed and how to apprehend its collective and temporal dimensions. The objectives are to show, on the one hand, how the forms of appropriation that have been developed during the genesis of the HSR project have had repercussions on strategies and practices observed later on, and to explain, on the other hand, how the interrelations between the different stakeholders’ actions stimulate the territorial appropriation of high-speed rail. The focus is on examining how political and institutional strategies have acted upon other agents’ practices throughout the different stages of the HSR project and how the various representations of high-speed rail have influenced the decisions and strategies adopted by the political sphere to strengthen the territorial integration of the new transportation supply.

Defining the territorial appropriation of high-speed rail from the relations between the actions and the representations of local actors requires a specific methodological approach which simultaneously takes into account these various social interactions and the temporal dimension of the process. This approach is presented in three sections. The first section outlines the issues of an analysis focused on appropriation to better understand the territorial implications of high-speed rail. The second section demonstrates the interest and relevance of transposing the analysis grid conceived by Brunel and Roux (2006) for the study of consumer habits to the process of HSR appropriation. The third section introduces a methodological framework to explain how appropriation has gradually taken shape over the various stages of a high-speed line project. Using the various data produced during the HSR project (from the early reports and studies produced during the gestation phase of the HSR project to the territorial planning documents and surveys of firms and passengers carried out after the arrival of high-speed rail), this methodological approach aims to report on the modes of HSR appropriation by jointly conducting the reconstitution of the trajectories of HSR appropriation with a semantic analysis of HSR representations. The first results¹ obtained from a comparative analysis of three French territorial planning documents have highlighted the importance of taking collective representations into account to better understand the territorial appropriation of HSR.

2. Scientific issues involved in an analysis of the appropriation of high-speed rail

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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Spatial short and long-term implications and planning challenges of high-speed rail: A literature review framework
• 1 A methodological approach to analyze the territorial appropriation of high-speed rail from interactions between actions and representations of local actors
• 2 Has HSR improved territorial cohesion in Spain? An accessibility analysis of the first 25 years: 1990–2015
• 3 Short- and long-term population and project implications of high-speed rail for served cities: analysis of all served Spanish cities and re-evaluation of Ciudad Real and Puertollano
• 4 Measuring the regional economic impacts of high-speed rail using a dynamic SCGE model: the case of China
• 5 Regional heterogeneity in Taiwan HSR demand developments: station accessibility and its effect on usage adoption
• 6 Efficiency of high-speed rail for business and tourism same-day trips: Effects of different transport-related factors
• 7 Are the reasons for companies to locate around central versus peripheral high-speed rail stations different? The case of Reims central station and Champagne-Ardenne station
• 8 Designing Paris Gare du Nord for pedestrians or for clients? New retail patterns as flow optimization strategies
• 9 Assessing spatial planning strategy in high-speed rail station areas in Spain (1992–2018): towards a sustainable model
• Conclusion: Key findings and need for future research
• Index