Turning Heritage Railway Architecture into an Infrastructure for Resilience and Circularity: An Opportunity for Sustainable Urban Regeneration

Since the introduction of railway lines and train stations in the heart of industrial cities, they have constituted a scar in the urban fabric, opening up an often complex dichotomy between the world of machines and the urban world, between trains and people. This scar has become even more apparent now that several railway infrastructures have fallen in disuse and are left to evolve into contemporary industrial ruins. Historic railway buildings and structures are an important subset of the urban architectural heritage to be enhanced. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we started witnessing urban regeneration projects fully enhancing the potential of these abandoned infrastructures running through the heart of cities and already naturally harbouring biodiversity. With the “Viaduc des Arts” in Paris and the New York “High Line” as precursors, several European cities are now embracing this approach. This paper looks at elevated rail tracks in urban settings and how their original monomodal scope can be reinterpreted through a strategic – sustainable, dynamic and open – approach enhancing their potential for power generation, food growing, biodiversity harvesting and social interaction. After a comparative analysis of five case studies, the paper proposes a methodology for defining adaptive reuse design scenarios for disused elevated railways and the underlying arches.