Intermediate and interminable: a railway regeneration drama in two acts

Nacima Baron and Yassine Khelladi

Chapter 6 in Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities, 2024, pp 104-118 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The term ‘regeneration’ as applied to railways suggests smart network modernisation. Through the case study of a Paris suburban line, it seems that the more the infrastructure is repaired, the less efficiently it seems to work. As a result, the line appears neither broken nor working, and this intermediate state is likely to persist for an indeterminate and maybe interminable period. The combination of two theoretical frameworks helps explore this enigma: the sociological concept of the trial develops the disparate processes of evaluation that underlie the notion of regeneration, and a model of resilience planning comprising two phases - disruption audit and recovery implementation - gives a chronological canvas. Both instruments allow us to consider the question - is infrastructure regeneration doomed to fail? - in terms of two acts in an infrastructural drama. The first act depicts the causes of the line’s breakdown; the second analyses the repair works. However, the vicissitudes of recovery destabilise the entire infrastructural regime and constantly reopen uncertainties about the diagnosis and solutions.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Environment; Geography; Sociology and Social Policy; Urban and Regional Studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781800889156.00015 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:20849_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().