Integrated Railway Planning in the North West Peloponnese

Abstract

Railway planning in Greece has for many years been oriented towards the technological modernisation of the railway network. The relevant planning agendas have often left the wider socio-spatial interests untouched, delivering infrastructure that is often detached from its surroundings. Such is the case of the North West Peloponnese, where centrally managed railway interventions clashed with local priorities. This generated place-specific problems and bottlenecks relating to the intermodal nature of the railway system and the connectivity of Patras, the region’s major port. For scholarly audiences, these phenomena manifest a gap in the planning process. In effect, railway infrastructures are not easily embedded in the particularities of the geographical context. By seeking an effective resolution to this problem, this paper investigates the influence of railway redevelopment in the wider urbanisation processes across the North West Peloponnese. In this context, it describes how railways may become an effective and competitive factor through the development of local synergies within the wider geographical specificities of its area of influence. It is argued that in order to conceptualise the description of synergies which directly or indirectly affect rail restructuring, there is a need for a new scale of observation – one that becomes instrumental through the conceptualisation of “service ecologies”, a term employed here to describe the intra-regional dependencies and interactions between railway infrastructures, stakeholders and land-use regimes. This methodology draws primarily on design research that the author conducted during the Test Planning Procedure for Patras in 2015. This provided insights into alternative working scenarios for efficient and cost-effective railway connection in the North West Peloponnese. The paper concludes that integrated railway development does not rely on the optimisation of a single infrastructural element or territorial scale, but rather on the careful orchestration of a synthetic landscape of networked infrastructures shaping space, regulating flows and interacting with actors besides mobility service provisions.