Historical Interrelationship of Railways and Cities from an Urban Viewpoint.

Abstract

This paper offers a conceptual overview of the state of the art relating to the historical interre­lationships between railways and cities from the point of view of town planning, covering the good century and a half that there have been railways in the Iberian Peninsula. It addresses both urban and railway history, reconsidering major issues in this relationship. These are: 1) the tracks of lines as they cross cities and the role they play in urban life, 2) the passenger buildings of stations, seen as a focus of urban centrality, 3) the developing complexity of cities and rail­ways, together with the installation of new road and port infrastructures, and 4) the problems emerging from urban ex­pansion in the final third of the twentieth century, mostly after the restoration of democracy, specifi­cally the question of the limited permeability of rail tracks and the interpretation as a social barrier of the physical barrier thus constituted by the railway. An idea that railways are a problem grew up within this historical interrelationship.

Liberalization, Trans-European Corridors and EU Funds: A New Scenario in the Relationship between Rail Networks and Mediterranean Cities

“…Even cities characterized as "peripheral" (Ciudad Real, Guadalajara, or Segovia) have made scientific contributions, such as the study by Ribalaygua [34] (also including seven French cities) or Bellet [35]. In this brief summary of works, we cannot fail to mention positions that are critical of the Spanish high-speed rail model (AVE), such as the works by Albalate and Bel [36], Bel, Estache, and Forcaud [37], and Romero et al [38], and that discuss the relationship between cities and high-speed trains in Spain, such as those published by Santos [39][40][41]. However, the literature analyzed here does not take into account the relationship between the urban areas and European transport corridors.…”