Jen Nelles (Oxford Brookes University) & Adam Brown (Cambridge Econometrics)
NOIR 2.0 officially launched at the RSA Winter Conference on November 7th with a session on Rail and Infrastructural Regionalisms.
The session challenged presenters to explore and draw out how regional rail infrastructure shapes regional imaginaries and governance and/or is shaped by it. Presentations focused predominantly on regional rail in the UK, touching on Northern Powerhouse Rail (Tom Arnold) and South Fylde (Chia-Lin Chen) lines in the North; HS2 (Dan Durrant), which was originally pitched as a high speed connection linking northern and southern parts of the country; and East West Rail (Dave Valler and Jen Nelles) - a line that will ultimately link Oxford and Cambridge and provide a strategic connection between eastern and western main lines. A case study of regional rail in the Cote D'Azur (Nacima Baron) offered a European perspective. Adam Brown concluded the session with some remarks reflecting on shared themes across presentations.
While presentations spanned various geographies they also spoke to each other, underlining how regional imaginaries and infrastructural regionalisms are mutually constituted. For example, Tom Arnold identified four periods of Northern regional imaginaries within which projects associated with Northern Powerhouse Rail have evolved. In each period, infrastructure priorities shifted to serve shifting logics from pan-regional connectivity of city center to linking left-behind places (and beyond). Here, regional imaginaries are in part constituted by perceptions of infrastructural deficiencies and rail planning occupies a central role in regional regeneration narratives even though no consensus yet exists as to the appropriate infrastructural remedy. Dave Valler and Jen Nelles contended that aspirational imaginaries that underpin the Oxford-Cambridge region rest on shaky foundations - the idea that linking infrastructure between two innovation poles will yield regional (or even national) benefits makes intuitive sense but lacks empirical evidence. However, the vision of a unified innovation region has played an important role in moving the East West Rail (EWR) project forward. Adam Brown added that the real logic behind EWR was to (re-)establish an important strategic connection between main lines and that the innovation region narrative was a politically expedient cloak for a project that was essentially about solving infrastructure and planning issues. This demonstrates how a multiplex of interests can adopt and use imaginaries that are aspirational or convenient, depending on perspective.
These examples suggest there may be a three-stage interdependency cycle of transport infrastructure, economic geographic reality, and administrative and perceptual boundaries: where evolution of transport infrastructure shapes economic geography, economic geography shapes the boundaries of a regional imaginary, and boundaries shapes the planning of infrastructure. While we have them listed here in one order, the cycle can start with any one of these. Similarly, there are questions about whether we do this “consciously” enough at each stage.
Imaginaries encompass but also exclude. Chia-Lin Chen's analysis of the South Fylde line, conceived as a connection between Blackpool and Preston in Lancashire, shows that projects that have not secured clear roles in regional narratives struggle to penetrate planning cycles. Earlier infrastructural interpretations of regional rail in the North were highly city centric and focused on linking city centers, paying less attention to the left behind places that anchored subsequent plans. In each period, as focus shifted, different places were deprioritized or excluded.
There has been an interesting evolution of thinking away from the simplistic urban-centric view to one where all components of a city region are understood as of equal importance and the key to growth is integration and coherence not favoring one type of area over another. Perhaps burnt over HS2, the infrastructural turn has evolved from advocating for between city-region connectivity like HS2 to within city-region connectivity like the Leeds Tram and (arguably) the Manchester-Liverpool railway, perhaps partly because this aligns better with political administration.
Time matters. Processes of regional imagination and infrastructure development unfold over time, and rarely in lockstep. Developments in one can drive, reshape, or disrupt progress on others. This is a major theme in NOIR's most recent edited collection, Infrastructural Times: Temporality and the Making of Global Urban Worlds and it is no surprise that it also emerged in this session. Crucially, in the case of Northern Powerhouse Rail, regional imaginaries have transmuted more quickly than planning process have been able to concretize infrastructure plans. In the Oxford-Cambridge case, various parts of the EWR line have been upgraded, connected, or completed over nearly a decade and so most attention is now focused on local dramas where remaining alignments have yet to be finalized. This fragmentation and a certain amount of parochialism undermines the regional logic as local actors emphasize the line's potential to relieve growth pressures and serve a broader commutershed.
The promise of regional infrastructure can also erode over time, dampening underlying logics and forcing narrative adjustments and political reckonings. Dan Durrant's paper offered a critical perspective on the logics underpinning the HS2 project citing, particularly related to economic growth potential and progress towards sustainability goals. As legs of the project were gradually cancelled these claims have become even more difficult to defend. However, one of the participants wondered if the current political tension over HS2 would have been as acute if it had been built decisively within expected timeframes.
Chia-Lin Chen and Dan Durrant both also discussed the difficultly of dealing with uncertainty and the problems with appraising major “transformational” projects in isolation when we know that the more “transformational” they are, the more critical their interdependencies with other policy areas. For instance HS2 has different impacts with and without a ban on domestic flights.
Infrastructure failures can impose limits on and change regional imaginaries and planning spaces. Nacima Baron's presentation on rail regeneration, modernization, and the sustainability transition in the Cote d'Azur in France adopted a systems perspective, identifying feedback loops and spirals from climate change related delays. As even localized phenomenon (such as brush fires) affect travel throughout the system the proliferation of climate change related incidents effectively changes the shape of the region defined by rail infrastructure as delays (temporarily) render parts of the region more remote or even inaccessible. This led to governance changes as France opened up markets for transit operators to replace the SNCF as well as a reimagining of the coastal system around the RER model.
Her presentation makes the point that understanding how cycles work and how we can influence them though systems-level approaches, and the importance of trying to develop solutions that are complementary over multiple objectives – for example automatically building climate resilience considerations into efforts to decarbonize. This is the kind of thinking necessary to recognize and evaluate the transformational potential of regional infrastructure.
This group of presentations stimulated a rich discussion and set up the potential for lots of future dialogue around different themes f rail and infrastructural regionalism. We will continue the conversation with a series of sessions on Infrastructuring Regions at the AAG Annual Meeting in March. And at the next RSA conference in Porto, we will turn our attention to issues of inclusive infrastructures and the dynamics of regional transformation. Stay tuned for the call for papers and announcements about future NOIR events.
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