RAILWAY STATION ROLE IN COMPOSING URBAN CONFLICTS

Despite railway infrastructure was the structural framework on which modern European States were developed, since then the relationship between railway and city has been characterized by physical, functional and social conflicts, mainly because of a lack in integration between infrastructural and urban policies. These critical situations have concentrated on railway stations surrounding areas, which have started symbolizing the main conflicts that are taking place inside the cities. Similarly to what happened in the XIX century, today railway is a strategic infrastructure for the European territory development, thanks to the introduction of high-speed transport systems and the promotion of rail transport as a more sustainable transport system that can quickly connect metropolitan central areas. Thus, railway stations represent an unmissable chance not only to carry out urban development and spatial cohesion policies, but also to solve old tensions caused by the sharing of physical space, which is more and more scarce and valuable, and by ghettoization phenomena between rail infrastructure and the surrounding urban context. Starting from the analysis of the most conflicting situations between rail stations and the surrounding areas, this paper investigates some recent renewal interventions on Italian and European main railway nodes and the expectations of the most important actors involved in these developments. Contemporary main rail stations appear as complex systems characterized by a dynamic balance among the different elements which form them and the interpretation of this polysemic nature allows to detect the most suitable design procedures and intervention strategies to make stations the privileged place where to compose conflict between city and railway.