High-Speed Rail Links: The Social and Economic Impact, Effect on Territory and the Opportunities they Offer for Urban Renewal

Abstract

Railways were seen from the start as factors offering territorial harmony and integration. Allowing as they
did for the connecting and occupying of new space, they became active factors in modifying the continuing
and compact structure of cities and opened the gates to new ways of organizing them and the theoretical
understanding of how they worked. Be this so, the author holds that they now have a different role in the
exploding urban spread of our cities over their territory and it is this that this paper discusses.
If the railway is making an outstanding contribution to integrating space at the economic level as it
consolidates city systems and market areas, its effect upon the organizing of cities is much less than was
hoped for. For the author, it is rather the railway station that has become, as it did in the past, that which
generates profi t margins around it, further strengthening its importance as within a new discontinuous
spatial contextual relationship in which physical proximity has lost out in importance to territorial
connectiveness.
The impact and effect of our new rail links that were embraced with but scant criticism as bearing out the
assumptions prior to their construction are here reviewed and contrasted. The analysis here made is grounded
upon the changes undergone in the level of organization in the territories affected and how this ties in with
the changes to the basic assumptions of classical thinking as to the spatial siting of economic activities.