Railway station, centres and markets: Change and stability in patterns of urban centrality

Abstract

Railway stations have become hubs of networks due to their high accessibility by different modes of transport at different scale levels and have emerged as potential new central places in metropolitan cities in Europe. Planners and designers put a lot of effort into transforming these railway station areas into urban centres. Nevertheless in the case of designing the spatial layout of these areas, the designer is often left with statistical information and some city's beautification design guidance. The role of the local street pattern as a factor that influences the liveability of an urban area around the station is often not taken into account. This dissertation is an attempt to define urban spatial frameworks for creating liveable space in station areas. Station areas in Indonesia and the Netherlands are analyzed by a grid configuration analysis to uncover space-structural details within the urban fabric as a field of movement and activity. These different case studies are subsequently compared, to analyze how the different street configurations affect the retail activities around those stations. The research results presented in this dissertation suggest that all the cases studied confirm a relationship between spatial configuration and the distribution pattern of commercial activities. Stations and the flow of additional pedestrians they produce will only influence the existing pattern of shops in a city if these railway-generated flows of regional-oriented pedestrians will be embedded in the street networks on both city- and local-scale level.