Railway-Oriented Spatial Development: A Principal Strategy for Integrated Spatial and Railway Development in Small and Mid-Sized Communities of Swiss Agglomerations

Abstract

The size of urban agglomerations is increasing in most countries as a result of the strengthening of the integration of regional economies and urban-rural coherent spatial development. However, due to cost-efficiency, uncontrolled growth might trigger low-density development at the expense of rural and natural land in case of uncoordinated land use management. There are land use tools such as ‘Transit-Oriented Development’ to justify densification with high quality land use development and good accessibility to public transport. However, holistic regional scale perspectives and integrated spatial and transportation concepts are often missing, hence failing to stimulate compact settlement developments. Furthermore, approaching the concept of ‘agglomeration’, defined as a functional region rather than as an administrative unit, is a complex task of planning that requires additional supportive instruments. Currently, 54% of the population and 65% of employees (80% of employees in the tertiary economic sector) in Switzerland live or work within one kilometre of a railway station. These figures demonstrate the high relevance of the railway network in the distribution of population and workplaces. The main hypothesis of this dissertation is that underdeveloped and empty land reserves in the catchment area of the railway stations can potentially contribute as a key drive for more compact forms of development in agglomerations. This is of paramount importance for densification in small and mid-sized communities, where more than 60% of land reserves are available. Thus, considering the potentials for compact development in the catchment area of railway stations, this work addresses coordinated spatial and transportation policy-making as an essential requirement for a principal strategy of “inward development before outward development”, and as preparation for a new strategy of “Railway-Oriented Spatial Development” (ROSD). Implementation of ROSD is confronted with various operational obstacles: fragmented local governance, general obligations of national and regional governments and low planning competence of the small and mid-sized communities, along with others. Identifying the complex planning tasks that ROSD should potentially tackle, this work evaluates the existing planning instruments, and proposes a new collaborative instrument of ‘corridor consilium’, which identifies the transit corridors as functional regions and clarifies the causes of the abovementioned problems. Missing collective understanding of the problem, sectoral planning and diverging interests, lack of planning cooperation beyond administrative borders and planning for functional spaces, to list but some of the aspects, can be the focus of a corridor conference. Therefore, a corridor conference facilitates the decision-making processes towards achieving the minimum strategy of ROSD, especially for small and mid-sized communities.