High-Speed Rail in European Medium-Sized Cities: Stakeholders and Urban Development

In order to evaluate the degree of local development that a high-speed rail (HSR) link will bring to a city, it is essential to take into account the capacity of the stakeholders in the local community to organize themselves to take advantage of their endogenous resources. Through the application of a new methodology, an analysis is proposed of the development process as experienced by three medium-sized cities with an HSR link: Lleida, Spain, Avignon, France, and Novara, Italy. In the conclusions, attention is drawn to certain problems typically encountered by medium-sized cities when implementing their local projects. These are basically the existence of a weak network of local stakeholders, a low level of involvement of the urban area and its region in the local development project, and a pattern of conflictive multiscale relationships. In many cases, the fragility of this urban context is due to a lack of adequate processes of internal and external governance.