Right to mobility and resilience routes. Reuse and relaunch of secondary railways for the regeneration of fragile territories in Italy and Spain

Abstract

The processes of metropolization of the territory foster the phenomena of spatial polarization that determines a growing state of economic and social fragility of the “inner peripheries” connected to infrastructure and environmental problems. In this context, the scientific debate and political agendas highlight the centrality of mobility, which redesign the “fast and slow areas” of the countries, the access to services and the potential for sustainable development, feeding or weakening the vital lymph of the territory, the flows of people and goods. The Right to Mobility, aimed to guarantee connections and accessibility, constitutes a fundamental part of a regeneration strategy to ensure a new urban welfare, within the framework of the resilience tracks for fragile territories.

In this context, the reflexion illustrated in this document is part of the research activity that the group of academics of the Universities La Sapienza, Roma Tre, UCLM and UPC are developing in the framework of urban and territorial regeneration issues, deepening the relationships between urban planning mobility, infrastructures and territorial regeneration and highlighting the challenges fostered by the presence of dismissed railways.

The research entitled “Resilience routes. Reuse and relaunch of minor railroads for the regeneration of fragile territories. Experiences in Italy and Spain” address the reactivation of underutilized or disused minor railway lines, through an integrated approach, moving from “landscapes of waste” to structuring axes of socio-economic and environmental rebalancing, as well as morphological reconfiguration and landscape valorization.

The proposal, based on the contextualization of the on-going dynamics in Italy and Spain, such as the marginalization of the “aree interne” and the “España vacía”, aims to identify new methodological and operational references, through the definition of guidelines for the reactivation and reuse of minor railway networks, in line with policies and programs aimed at responding to divestment processes of infrastructures.

The research adopts three consolidated perspectives within the framework of the urban debate to analyze the phenomena of “fragilization” and cases of plans and projects, in consistence with the policies and programs:

- a "structural" perspective, which identifies the regeneration of the railway network as an opportunity for the socio-economic revitalization of marginal areas, based on a reactivation of the public service towards a “right to mobility”;

- a "morphological and landscape" perspective, based on the deepening of the form as a cognitive and planning tool to interpret the identity of places and enjoyment as an indispensable element to govern the perception of the territory, which focuses on the osmotic relationship between infrastructure and landscape;

- an “ecological and environmental” perspective, which considers the regeneration of railways as an opportunity for sustainable development, which suggests the transformation into integrated green networks fostering new forms of slow mobility and collective ecological values.

In this framework, moving within an inductive and iterative research process, the document summarizes the first results of the research that underline the need for new integrated and intercalar planning categories for infrastructure networks: rapid mobility corridors, tourist railroads, green ways, new operational criteria that identify the roads as "regeneration figures" that put in synergy ordinary and extraordinary tools, multilevel public and private resources, long, medium and short term scenarios, as well as new international and multilevel forms of network and services management.