Abstract
This study aims at demonstrating how cycle tourism could activate a regeneration of small and medium sized stations in inland areas, able to involve also territorial and urban areas hosting these stations. Starting point of this research is the issue of the small and medium sized Italian stations, mostly unused even if they are still active as rail service. Since control of trains’ traffic is organized only in bigger railway yards, small stations are gradually becoming empty containers: ghost stations, without any railway personnel. Thanks to the potentiality of the cycle tourism, riding slow through landscapes, it becomes possible to valorize and safeguard this heritage, not only exploiting its potentiality as shift-node between train and bike, but also imaging a systemic strategy triggering urban, territorial and social reactivation. Main challenge was to experiment how another model of mobility, the cycle tourism, able to promote a territorial project preferring to pass slowly through the inland areas, avoided by the fast infrastructural lines, could contribute in such regeneration process. In order to validate this intuition, it was carried out a project of four stations in proximity of the cycle tourist path VENTO, along the Po River. These stations were transformed in “green mobility hubs”, where shifting from train to bicycle and vice versa. This becomes the occasion to imagining new functions hosted in empty spaces of stations (both internal and external): they will provide cycle tourists with territorial info and specific services, such as repair areas and bikes and baggage safekeeping and both tourists and local inhabitants with social activities in order to bring them to live again station’s area. These functions want to generate an expectation, both in tourists and local people, to rediscover the territory around: in this way stations reassume their role of urban and territorial gates.
Highlights
In this work we focus on a new opportunity that can arise matching together cycle tourism and stations
Moscarelli et al City Territ Archit (2017) 4:13 places and a center for local enterprise and cooperation” (Edwards 1997). This heritage of small and medium sized stations is mostly located in inland Italian areas, distant from metropolitan areas of the Country
The provision of adequate transport service primarily constitutes a pre-requisite for the development of inland territories, but it can provide momentum for local growth. Identifying innovative solutions, both managerial and related with a possible integration with other sustainable mobility, is a big challenge for local development policy. These preliminary considerations lead to the identification of some criteria to help shaping a mobility strategy for the inland areas
Summary
In this work we focus on a new opportunity that can arise matching together cycle tourism and stations. Moscarelli et al City Territ Archit (2017) 4:13 places and a center for local enterprise and cooperation” (Edwards 1997) This heritage of small and medium sized stations is mostly located in inland Italian areas, distant from metropolitan areas of the Country. The provision of adequate transport service primarily constitutes a pre-requisite for the development of inland territories, but it can provide momentum for local growth Identifying innovative solutions, both managerial and related with a possible integration with other sustainable mobility, is a big challenge for local development policy. These preliminary considerations lead to the identification of some criteria to help shaping a mobility strategy for the inland areas. One of these consists of encouraging modal shift towards collective transport, improving and relaunching rail system
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