Railway station, The Image of the City, and transit-oriented development: an appraisal of the cognitive value of transit hubs

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ABSTRACT A train station may be seen as an anecdote about the history and evolution of a city, a system of interaction between human groups, a space for the production and provision of services, a place of collective consumption and linked decisions, an arena of physical vigor, or a field of conflict. What draws the attention of this study toward train stations is the shifting interest of urban policymakers and governance authorities from automobile-dependent unsustainable cities towards public transit-oriented sustainable cities. Therefore, academic attention needs to be paid to the cognitive characteristics of train stations and the implication of those characteristics on the practices that consider stations as an inevitable ingredient of urban development. This research addresses the intuitive question of how train stations, the cognitive value associated with them, and the importance of this value as obligatory constituents of decisions can affect urban policy formulation and allocation of resources. The present endeavor is grounded on the objective of making a general theoretical argument about the relevance and responsiveness of train stations to the history and functioning of urban places, the consequent human cognitive value attached to them and the possible role of this value in a specific set of actions, i.e. rail-based transit-oriented development. This objective guided the fundamental argument of this research: the cognitive importance of railway stations as identity-makers of urban landscape must be acknowledged by the contemporary urban development practices that consider train stations as catalysts of socially inclusive, economically viable and environmentally sustainable urban development.