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The rail traveller, pedestrian or customer?
Passenger flow and retail: critical boundary objects in HS Station development

and face recognition). Consequently, the long passageway has been converted to a free strolling
area, where people can freely shop. The highly profitable corridor of shops remain mostly, but
its continuity is broken up by mini confortable lounges and a shallow counter with barstool
type chairs, where travellers can lean to enjoy the view below. Then there is a second retail
module leading to a large and luxurious lounge (for the importance of waiting areas Van Hagen
M., 2011). This 2010-2017 comparison leads us to recontextualize and discuss, as in Pitsiava-
Latinopoulou M. Iordanopoulos P., 2012, the place of design in connecting flow management
and commercial development.

4. Eye and foot, shops and surfaces, movement and value creation

4.1 Beyond station commodification

The interplay between flow reorganisation and retail space rearrangement in Gare du Nord
shows how railway institutions (Gares&Connexions and its subsidiaries, Retail&Co for retail
space management, AREP for arrangement and design) are introducing flow management
as a way to maintain movement and produce value. The guiding principles of the changes
observed since 2010 are inspired by a fast-growing science of mobility, driven by transnational
trends that draw on airport development principles and on railway architecture and design.
These chages show us very materially the railway adaptation to a new legal and institutional
environment. Here in the Gare du Nord, disadvantaged as it is compared with its counterpart,
Saint-Pancras Station in London, the station operator has taken every opportunity to enhance
its image and is preparing, in the near future, to offer SNCF and its competitors equal
excellence in the range of B2B and B2C services. The hypothesis we have now demonstrated
of the interdependence between processes intended both to make spaces of movement more
efficient and retail outlets more profitable, now raises further critical questions on the new
nature of station's spatiality and commerciality.
Our analysis shows that flow management, generates additional consumption, in other
words greater profitability, not only because of the increase in passenger numbers or
retail spaces, but through the intensification of commerciality produced by spatial
rearrangements. The increase in the average sales transaction and in purchase frequency,
the diversity of consumption modes (routine or impulse buying, automatic or considered
purchase) reflect parallel nudging processes of movement activation and behaviour
modification among clients. In order to gain further understanding of the determinants
of these events (choice of movement and impulse to buy), we now need to go beyond a
rationalistic conception of commerce and beyond a mere mechanistic approach to flow,
by debunking two illusions.
The first illusion entertained by station traffic engineers is that the traveller’s allowance time
can be divided up in the same way as Euclidean space, that one can identify a time of arrival
at the station, then a time of information searching, then a time of access to the platform
and waiting. This division is the only way to individualise an allowance time that is itself
divided into two parts, the first under conditions of stress (when the traveller’s movement
is determined by the need to identify the right platform and check the departure time), the
second without stress and allocated to other activities (waiting or shopping), hence waiting
rooms and stores. The central component of traffic streaming, the nudge, seeks to use aural,
visual or digital messages to modulate the decisions of pedestrians, to encourage without
forcing, influence without pushing, and gently to prompt individuals, through the appeal of
brands, or gregarian attitude, to move in the right directions at the right time. However, this
mathematical partitioning fails to take account of the reality of the traveller’s experience,
in other words to the chaos of sensations, emotions and states of mind in which they are
immersed from their arrival in the station (Löfgren O., 2008), with the result that time as

International Congress on High-speed Rail: Technologies and Long Term Impacts - Ciudad Real (Spain) - 25th anniversary Madrid-Sevilla corridor 93