“Railways and Cities at a Crossroads: urban landscape and industrial heritage around stations on the Iberian Peninsula, 1850-2017 (EstaciónDigital)”

Carmen Delgado Viñas, Universidad de Cantabria; Pedro Pablo Ortúñez Goicolea and Francisco Zaparaín Hernández, University of Valladolid; Ian Gregory, University of Lancaster; Francisco Javier Tapiador Fuentes, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha; Cèsar Carreras Monfort, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona; Cristina Purcar, University of Cluj; Olga Macías Muñoz, Universidad del País Vasco; Eduard Álvarez Palau, Cambridge University; Ana Cardoso de Matos, María Ana Bernardo, María da Luz Sampaio, Sheila Palomares Alarcón, Fernanda de Lima Lourencetti, Pietro Viscomi and Armando Graça Quintas, Universidade de Évora; Mateu Morillas Torné, Jorge Solanas Jiménez,Universidad de Lleida; Ana Belén Berrocal Menárguez, Graziella Trovato and Cristina López García de Leániz, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid; Vitor Manuel Araújo de Oliveira, Universidade do Porto.

The goal of this project is to reconstruct and visualize the momentum created by railways stations since they first appeared in Spain and Portugal.

The idea is to create a new empirical database that will allow a comparative analysis of these critical crossroad spaces (station/city) and to compile written and graphic records into a digital format capable of illustrating the changes that took place around railway stations. Based on this information, a new methodology will be developed to determine the circumstances in which railways contributed to transforming the urban landscape.

A multidisciplinary approach will be adopted for this research – reflecting the profiles of the team members – as it involves economic history, town planning, architecture, civil engineering, geography and digital humanities.

The project is markedly focused on historical data but its research leads up to the present. The combination of both perspectives will enable arguments to be brought to the current debate on the location (central or peripheral) of high-speed train stations in cities.

The work is supported by and fosters close academic cooperation between Spain and Portugal, two countries with clear geographic, historical and cultural ties and whose respective railway networks reveal a clearly unified approach to the Iberian Peninsula.