Mapping the Potential Territorial Impact of Railways. High Speed Rail and Territorial Sensitivity of Italian Regions

The Italferr Sustainability Unit and the FS Research Centre of the Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane Group have been developing an integrated set of pillars and indicators for the Territorial Impact Assessment of railways, taking into account the state of the art related to the evaluation of the socio-economic and environmental impacts of infrastructure. The approach has been developed along a research path including experts’ discussions and applied experimentation in several railway projects, as mandatory ongoing steps to achieve the definition of Guidelines for the Territorial Impact Assessment of Railways, for the Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane Group and other interested stakeholders. In fact, professionals, academia and policymakers increasingly acknowledge the need to consider possible territorial effects of new policies and projects in the field of territorial cohesion, with references to large EU infrastructure projects, pointing out the diversity of impacts in European regions. Furthermore, practice shows that these impacts are sometimes felt at regional/local level instead of having a global impact for the entire European territory, due to the “sensitivity of regions”. Territorial (regional) sensitivity can be described as the degree to which a territory (region) is directly and indirectly affected, either adversely or beneficially by change, in relation to “how single territories/regions are subject to specific fields, due to their socio-economic and geographical characteristics and to the social values and territorial stakeholders they are likely to show”, taking into account possible benefits of infrastructure on functional organisation, environment and communities. In this context, the paper proposes a methodology and a first sensitivity framework of Italian regions in the field of railways, supporting the assessment process in order to contribute to the definition of Guidelines for the Territorial Impact Assessment of Railways. To this end, the papers is articulated in five parts: Introduction, Theoretical background, Research Design, Results and Conclusions.