Page 348 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

Facchinetti-Mannone,Valérie.

1. Introduction

Faced with the great diversity of territorial implications of high-speed rail (HSR) and in response
to the difficulties in discriminating the specific transport impact from other factors influencing
economic and spatial development, researchers are now focusing more on understanding the
process by which territorial changes occur, to explain how economic and social agents and
local authorities have appropriated the new transportation system through their behaviours,
practices and representations. If appropriation plays a crucial part in territorial dynamics, it’s
necessary to decipher its mechanisms in order to facilitate the understanding of territorial
reconfigurations linked to the arrival of high-speed rail. Appropriation is considered as a
collective construction process resulting from the multiple interactions between the agents
involved in the territorialization of the HSR system. The focus is on examining how political
and institutional strategies have acted upon other agents’ practices throughout the different
stages of the HSR project and how the companies’ expectations and users’ representations of
high-speed rail have influenced the decisions and strategies adopted by the political sphere to
strengthen the territorial integration of the new transportation supply.
Defining the territorial appropriation of high-speed rail from the relations between the actions
and the representations of local actors requires the development of a specific methodological
approach which simultaneously takes these various social interactions and the temporal
dimension of the process into account. This approach is presented in three sections. After
mentioning the issues of an analysis focused on appropriation, the article proposes a dynamic
perspective of the process by transposing the analysis grid conceived by Brunel and Roux (2006)
for the study of consumers’ habits and finally reviews the methods used to analyze the process
of appropriation that participates in the territorialization of a new transport infrastructure.

2. Scientific issues of an analysis focused on the appropriation of high-speed rail

2.1 The decisive role of the territorial appropriation of high-speed rail

The complex interdependencies between transport, society and territory make it difficult to
dissociate the effects of a transport infrastructure from other factors involved in economic
and spatial changes. Many scientific studies have shown that the infrastructure and the new
conditions of accessibility are, ultimately, only development opportunities that territorial actors
have to grasp by the means of accompanying measures and appropriate development strategies.
So appropriation is recognized as a condition of success for the territorial development projects
which started with the commissioning of a new transport infrastructure. For example, regarding
the North European high-speed line, P. Menerault has clearly shown that the territorial changes
linked with the improvement of rail accessibility closely depended on the national, regional and
local modes of appropriation of the high-speed rail service (Menerault, 1996, 1997 and 2000).
By analyzing the impact of the French eastern European high-speed line on the activation of
tourist resources in Reims, Bazin, et al. (2010) have highlighted that the collective appropriation
of the HSR service and the ability of actors to collaborate were the key to the emergence of the
positive “effects” of the infrastructure. In order to understand how the territory appropriates
the new transport supply, a few works focus on the actors’ strategies and logics (Blanquart,
et al., 2010; Chaplain, 1994; Cohou, 2000). Cecilia Ribalaygua has conducted a very detailed
analysis of enhancement strategies that intended to anticipate, support and promote the arrival
of high-speed rail in small-sized Spanish cities and has emphasized the major influence of these
strategies in the spatial and economic changes she has observed (Ribalaygua, 2006).

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