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Facchinetti-Mannone,Valérie.

their spatial implications, these functional changes reflect specific forms of appropriation that
need to be identified in order to better understand the diversity of territorial impacts of high-
speed rail.
The various approaches proposed to analyse the co-construction of the appropriation process,
from the emergence of the HSR project to the trivialization of its uses, aim at reconstructing
appropriative trajectories to identify, in the long run, the relations that these trajectories
maintain with the location and territorial integration of stations. Even if it is difficult to
compare HSR projects designed at different times, this long-term follow-up allows to specify
the influence of the decision-making context on the appropriation process, in relation with the
spatial representations intrinsically linked to the travel practices and the uses of high-speed
rail stations. Indeed, these places are invested with meanings and values that participate in
their appropriation. This necessary confrontation between practices (concrete appropriation) and
representations (abstract appropriation) involves an exploration of the imaginary dimension of
stations in order to relate it to the individual and collective strategies created by high speed rail.

Fig. 3: Synthesis table of the proposed methodological approach

4.2 A semantic exploration of high-speed rail imaginary representations

High-speed rail, synonymous with renewal of accessibility and symbol of modernity, has largely
enhanced the image of regions with high speed train services. Vectors of this “image” effect,
the renewal of the architecture of railway stations, the redevelopment of the station area and
territorial marketing campaigns promoting the attractiveness of newly destinations, participa-
te, each in their own way, in increasing the legibility and the reputation of the areas served
by HSR (the image they give of themselves) and in the construction of territorial identity (the
image that they have of themselves).
Neglected for a long time by geographers, spatial representations, under the influence of social
geography, have completely become objects of research whose heuristic interest is no longer
to be demonstrated. As Bailly and Ferras (1997) have pointed out, geography draws its richness
from the analysis of a permanent mixture of the real and the imaginary. By analogy with the
Image of the City studied by K. Lynch (1960) or Y. Chalas (2003), the image of train stations
refers to the representations they produce, the expectations and fears they feed, the values
they convey and the myths they help to forge. By mixing perception of reality, social values and

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