Sustainability or Connectivity? The Neoliberal Logics of Train Station Area Development

Abstract

Addressing conceptual and empirical lacunae in existing work on train station (area) development (TSAD), this paper seeks to systematically bring into conversation research on TSAD with literature on neoliberal urbanization. Two major sets of driving factors for urban redevelopment have been identified by TSAD research: economic restructuring and concerns for sustainability. I argue that this conceptual dichotomy is problematic. Contemporary TSAD is overwhelmingly driven by the logics of neoliberalization: political actors use sustainability discourses to create place-based competitive advantages so as to attract business and capital by enhancing network connectivity and revalorizing central urban space. Using the mega-project "Stuttgart 21" in Germany as a case study I demonstrate that it is essentially designed to secure nodal functions of Stuttgart Central Station (enhance network connectivity) and upgrade the station and adjacent area (revalorize the urban core)-whereas questions of sustainability play a subordinated role at best. For some thirty years now we have witnessed large-scale restructuring processes in cities trying to adapt to a situation that is commonly referred to as globalization. Urban infra-structures, especially transportation infrastructures, change their use, become obsolete, or need to be newly created. As a result, transport sites such as ports, airports, and railway stations are subjected to continuous redevelopment. Rather than treating globalization as an abstract concept of external flows of capital, commodities, and people that are driven by technological development and economic necessity-as dominant (neoliberal) discourses would have it-scholars of critical urban studies have emphasized the functioning of globalization processes through space, depending on physical support structures and producing and reproducing uneven spatial development patterns (Harvey 1989; Graham 2001; Vormann, forthcoming). This perspective directs our attention to the political character of globalization processes, i.e., the capitalist restructuring processes that constitute the motor of globalization and the politics of neoliberalism that serve as imperfect orientation guidelines for these processes to unfold in context-dependent and crisis-prone ways (Peck 2010).