Cities on Rails

The Redevelopment of Railway Stations and their Surroundings

Luca Bertolini, Tejo Spit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135811242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

Features the most successful and interesting current projects in this area of development and planning Responds to wide international interest in urban regeneration projects and transportation issues Offers practical guidance to complex issues based on research findings

Part One

Conceptual framework

1
Railway station area redevelopment in the spotlight

1.1
Cities on rails: an introduction

Railway stations and their surroundings are the focus of ambitious redevelopment plans throughout urban Europe. A complex set of factors—as diverse as the promotion of sustainable transport and land use, the stimulation of local economies, technological and institutional change, the business cycle and the spatial impact of globalization—drives these initiatives. Both differences and similarities are found among the national and local approaches, and there is certainly much to be learned from looking across borders.

As Europe changes, patterns of urban development are also changing, falling into step with the ongoing process of internationalization. The redevelopment of railway station areas throughout Europe is often an important part of urban restructuring. To many, these processes appear fragmented. Moreover; the information they provide is partial; it rarely sheds light on any relevant developments taking place elsewhere in Europe.

Yet it is surprising how much information about this subject is available on individual projects. It is also surprising how widely this knowledge is spread among the parties involved, so that no one party has the whole picture. Another problem is the rapid obsolescence of the information. The planning and development of railway station areas takes a long time, and so knowledge gets out of date, changes, or simply disappears in the course of the project. It is for the same reason that the actors involved in one redevelopment process learn relatively little from others participating in the same process. As redevelopment plans are continuously changed and adjusted, it does not pay to make the effort to learn. However true this may be for most railway station redevelopment plans, the full scope of the problem is even more apparent when we compare different railway station sites in Europe. Although there is already a wealth of experience in the continent that could be applied, participants in any one project know very little about railway station area redevelopment elsewhere. The benefits of sharing this knowledge are obvious. An open exchange of information helps the parties to put their own experiences in perspective. Furthermore, it can help to solve problems, by showing how similar situations have been addressed.

In a Europe without borders, capital flows can migrate from one metropolitan area to another. It is often concluded that those cities that are the most competitive will gain the greatest advantage. In order to remain competitive, cities and metropolitan areas will have to mobilize their potential to retain and improve their market position for footloose capital. When we assess the competitiveness of metropolitan areas in the European context, we should keep in mind that their strength will depend upon their performance in key sectors. Railway station areas constitute one of these sectors. In a European development market, redevelopment strategies for railway station areas could prove increasingly important in attracting or repelling economic activities.

In those central cities where the redevelopment of railway station areas is impeded by conservation and heritage policies, extra constraints burden the development prospects. While the direct costs of redevelopment are likely to remain at the lowest spatial level—consisting of the railway station area and its immediate surroundings—its benefits tend to spread over a wider area. The metropolitan region is the first to benefit. Because the redevelopment process comprises various issues, as the spatial scale decreases so the need for a more integrated approach increases. Total integration, however, is a fiction. Therefore at this level the aims of economic development and transport and mobility improvement must go hand in hand with the aims of environmental protection and social integration. The constraints mentioned earlier refer to these complex relations. Although the constraints may seem enormous, the actors numerous, and the processes complex, a successful redevelopment of such areas can prove vital for the attractiveness of the city and the region.

The main objective of this study is to provide information about railway station redevelopment throughout Europe, and to analyse it, highlighting the similarities and differences. At the same time, this study places the redevelopment processes within their national contexts in order to understand their peculiarities, to identify which constraints generate specific problems, and to point out opportunities for specific solutions.

The complexity of the redevelopment of railway station areas can be traced back to its different components. The task involves different stages of development, different kinds of location, different actors, and different functions. In studying this complexity, one is free to choose one of these components as a perspective for analysis. The actor-centred approach is often used (e.g. Teisman, 1992). Despite the new insights that may be gained through such analysis, the results may be rather one-sided. A more comprehensive analysis—in which the major components are related to one another—seems to be a more promising way to tackle the complexity, because it is just these relationships that are responsible for the internal dynamics (or lack of dynamics) of the redevelopment process. Because the redevelopment of railway station areas can be viewed as a multifocus problem, it should be viewed from several perspectives at the same time; and that requires a more holistic approach.

The analytical framework for this study is derived from the planning triangle (Figure 1.1), which provides a general frame of reference. In the planning triangle, object variables(such as site and locational characteristics) interact withprocess variables(such as actors, interests, and intervening developments) andcontext variables(such as national planning systems, the social and cultural trends of each country, major economic developments, and internationalization processes).

The way in which the planning triangle is used as a frame of reference will be elaborated in subsequent sections of this chapter. First, the factors behind the present wave of railway station area redevelopment in Europe will be discussed.

Fig. 1.1 The planning triangle.

1.2
Driving forces behind railway station area redevelopment

The redevelopment of railway station areas represents a major effort for most European cities in one way or another. Pressure is mounting on these cities to take up the challenge. Most metropolitan areas in Europe have responded to it. Stimulated by the decline in spending by national governments (Spit, 1993), those cities have become more entrepreneurial (Kreukels and Spit, 1990; Parkinson et al., 1991). Throughout Europe, cities have embarked upon urban regeneration projects as a means to market themselves on an international scale. These efforts not only include the redevelopment of railway station areas but also apply to waterfront areas, inner-city housing projects and so forth. This shift towards municipalities’ profiling themselves by undertaking the physical restructuring of inner-city areas is visible in most of Europe.

A combination of factors may explain the emphasis on railway station redevelopment initiatives in Europe. The combination includes both structural evolution and policy discourse. With reference to the cases described later in this book, the most important factors fall under five headings. These are elaborated below.

1.2.1
Two distinct types of public policy

Both policies result in the promotion of urban redevelopment at stations. On the one hand there are policies to promote environmentally sustainable transportation and land-use patterns. Among the examples studied here, the most clearly formulated policies are those adopted by the national government in the Netherlands, and also by regional and local governments in Switzerland. On the other hand there are policies to regenerate local economies by restructuring the urban fabric. Such measures are also initiated or favoured by national governments (as in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) but most explicitly by local governments (as in France and the Netherlands). All the countries and cities mentioned here are confronted by largely similar pressures and trends. These include constraints on public expenditure, deregulation, a shift from social to economic and environmental objectives, the rise (and fall) of public-private partnerships, and an emerging centrality of infrastructure investments in public policies. Particular national and local planning systems, institutional contexts and local political cultures have resulted in responses to these challenges that are sometimes different and sometimes similar.

1.2.2
Positive and negative technological change

Both types of change create urban redevelopment opportunities at stations. Positive changes— that is, ones that make station locations more easily accessible—include the expansion of high-speed train (HST) systems, and also of advanced regional, S-Bahn and RER/TER-type networks. The most notable negative changes—those that make space available for development—are the transfer of freight and heavy industrial activities away from stations and towards other locations. Among the cases analysed, the role of positive technological change is most evident in France (with the TGV), in Switzerland (with the S-Bahn systems), and in the Netherlands and again Switzerland (with massive national rail investment packages). Negative changes are of a more structural nature. While not explicitly mentioned in the national outlines that follow, they are ubiquitous at the local level.

1.2.3
Institutional change

While there is an evolution in the roles of all public and private actors, the most striking and relevant changes are those occurring to the railway companies, as captured by the term privatization. The railways are of course key actors in station area redevelopment. Their privatization (however that term is interpreted) has far-reaching implications for the nature of the initiative. In some cases, this might be the one factor that actually triggers a plan. Privatization, however, is an open-ended process rather than a definite state, and it means different things in different countries. Among the cases analysed, it is most advanced and carries the most weight in the United Kingdom and Sweden. There, however, two very different approaches are being pursued, as we shall see. Commercialization plays an increasingly critical role in Switzerland, where its implications are nevertheless still ambiguous. But it also plays a pivotal role in the Netherlands, where it helps to distinguish a first generation of plans from an incipient second generation of station plans. Privatization is the least advanced in France.

1.2.4
The property cycle

Property booms are partly autonomous and partly related to an explosion in office demand at certain locations and times. Their incidence is also a factor in station area redevelopment. Real estate market cycles have had a compelling influence rather than just a contextual relevance in most London station projects. When the boom turned to bust, the market was a decisive factor in the failure of initiatives such as that taken by the London Regeneration Consortium for King’s Cross. In Sweden the collapse of the property market first led to a standstill. Then it prompted a different approach to station area redevelopment, one that is demand driven rather than supply driven. A similar move in Switzerland distinguishes initiatives such as Zentrum Zürich Nord or Basel EuroVille from the ‘outdated’ Zürich HauptBahnhof Süd West. Anticipating this reorientation, the market in France and the Netherlands appears to have had a deflating rather than an inflating effect on station projects. There, developers and investors alike have been urging caution and raising doubts about the expectations of ‘entrepreneurial’ municipalities.

1.2.5
Internationalization and metropolitanization

The internationalization of the economy is imposing the need for far-reaching restructuring in the urban fabric of western Europe. Urban economies are undergoing a process of spatial expansion, functional ‘sorting-out’ and division of tasks on a regional scale (Louter, 1996). A space of flows, where specialized and integrated clusters of activities are interconnected both within and outside urban regions, is being superimposed on a historical, weakening space of places (Castells, 1989). Station areas are potential nodes in emerging transport and information networks (Bertolini, 1996a, 1996b). An awareness of this possibility and of its implications is beginning to surface in the approach to station area redevelopment across Europe. The initiatives of several cities in France, and most notably of Lille, point in this direction. However, too many unverified assumptions still underpin most strategies there. The debate on the potential roles of station areas as transport and information gateways within multicentred urban regions in a global context is gaining momentum elsewhere too, particularly in the Netherlands and Switzerland. Although the direction is somewhat ambiguous in the other countries, the potential role as a gateway could indeed become the main criterion by which to appraise station area redevelopment initiatives in the future.

The station area redevelopment plans peculiar to each country reflect distinct combinations of the factors described above. However, common trends are also arising and, most interestingly, might become stronger in the future. European integration is of course a very important factor in this regard. From the point of view of transformation at stations, the leading role of the European Commission in the privatization of national railways is particularly important. Its standpoint is formulated in Directive 91/440. Also important is the Union’s support for rail transport in general and for the development of a European HST network in particular. For instance, of the 14 links envisaged within the framework of the Trans-European Networks (TEN) programme, nine are rail links. On the other hand, all the evidence presented in the case studies suggests that local and national institutional and policy contexts will continue to be very important in determining how European and ‘global’ factors will translate in specific cases. Especially interesting is the diversity of responses to the largely similar challenges raised by station area redevelopment, as discussed further on in the book.

1.3
Organization of the book

The underlying structure of the book is quite simple. It consists of two main parts. Part One can be described as the theoretical part. In Part Two, the emphasis is on empirical evidence: a description of seven case studies in five countries.

Part One presents a number of ideas and concepts that are used to analyse the redevelopment of railway station areas in a systematic way. It posits that the issue at stake in this study is part of a larger European approach to urban planning. In the near future, Europe will have no more internal borders, and capital flows will be increasingly footloose. Accordingly, metropolitan areas will do their utmost to promote themselves. The redevelopment of certain inner-city areas is an important element in this campaign. Along with waterfronts, railway station areas can be considered one of the most important assets in this endeavour. The complexity of the subject may be reduced by splitting it into three parts. That division is reflected in the organization of this book. The first part of the book is structured along the lines of its leading (planning) concept. The process(who does wha when) and the object(the railway station area) are placed against the background of a regional, national and international context.

In Chapters 2 and 3, the essential characteristics of a railway station area (the object) are explained. Then in Chapter 3 relevant participants and their respective interests are described. That overview also presents the consequences for the area’s development potential (the process). The contextual elements are the main subject of Chapter 4 (the context). Although the structure is segmented, it will be clear that object, process and context are interrelated. Therefore each chapter builds upon elements from the preceding chapters. Consequently, the once simple structure becomes increasingly complex. But in this case a complex structure is the best way to elucidate these complex processes.

Part Two consists of five chapters. Each describes and analyses railway station redevelopment processes in a particular country: France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. In each of these five chapters, context, process and object variables are systematically discussed. Each chapter in Part Two includes a brief description of the national planning system, as that forms part of the development context.

In Part Three, the final chapter of the book takes a wider perspective. It seeks to combine the common e...