PORTA · Railway Stations as Interface between The Global and The Local

Railway stations as interface between the global and the local

Currently in Europe there is a revival of railway development with the prospective of expanding the high-speed rail (HSR) network to Central and Eastern Europe, based on integrated policies for spatial development and environmental protection, and due to HSR evolving technologies. Moreover, according to the Transport 2050 roadmap, the European rail network should triple by the end of 2030. The prospect of these changes raises a set of spatial and governance issues that require contextual examination with respect to the various impacts of these transformations at urban, regional and continental levels. The PORTA project builds an understanding of such transformations, by means of archival and field explorations that focus on the use of urban space, and implicitly spatial quality, in and around inner-city railway stations. Paris, Zurich and Bucharest are the three cities selected for analyses, as nodes of the European rail network being currently at different stages in the development of high-speed rail. Also at more local levels, they present relatively different solutions to the rail transport integration in the everyday life, and such differences are elements of the analysis that advance the research findings. To address questions regarding possible solutions and governance options for the operation of a continental public transport system across disparate technical, political and institutional structures, within the PORTA project was organized at ETH Zurich a symposium with experts in the related fields, engaged in practice, coming from Paris, Zurich, Vienna and Bucharest (see the International Symposium on Railway Development, on the project website: www.porta.ethz.ch/symposium.html - active on June 20, 2013). If keeping the status quo, it is likely that there will be an increase of disparities between the least developed, and the more advanced railway systems that have already experience with HSR development and operation. Hence networking and in depth communication within research and development projects need to be established across the European countries, in particular between the respective infrastructure nodes, in order to exchange theoretical knowledge and practical experiences that may lead toward a more integrated continental space. With examples from field research in Paris, Zurich and Bucharest, the PORTA project illustrates some consequences of rail transport changes on the spatial quality of the mobility nodes, precisely the inner-city railway stations, that become some sort of 'high-speed places' at the interface between the local and the global. For that, as part of the field research, participant observations were performed in Paris in the railway stations that are international HSR destinations namely Gare du nord, Gare de l'est and Gare de Lyon, while in Zurich and in Bucharest were explored the central railway stations: Zurich Hauptbahnhof and Bucharest Gara de nord. The information elicited from field inquiry together with findings from archival research are used to formulate a synthetic view of the spatial practice in the mobility environments, which is meant to solve a complex optimization problem between the everyday life rhythms, and design and development choices within large projects associated with the rail transport. In this way the project adds an important missing link between spatial research of railway stations and networks development, and the real-world projects of infrastructure development and spatial planning. The theoretical findings are useful in undertaking future field research, and also can be applied into practice, in a variety of policy and planning contexts, towards reaching agreement with respect to location and planning choices within the decision-making processes on future railway networks development.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union