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Communication dans un congrès Année : 2020

Strategies of private stakeholders for enhancing railway stations in peri-urban areas: focus on real estate professionals

Résumé

Enhancing railway stations has been at the heart of public policies for several decades. It concerns both urban and peri-urban areas. In most cases, it takes the form of the concept of Transit Oriented Development (TOD), which is developed in local planning documents and operational tools. The TOD principles correspond to challenges of both densification around public transport lines and urban re-conquest of station areas. In France, since the early 2000s, there has been a multitude of urban studies and reflections dealing with urbanization policies around rail stations to promote train use. Moreover, many scientific works have analyzed strategies of public stakeholders but they are quiet discreet on strategies of the private sphere. Have private stakeholders also taken up this challenge of promoting the station as an asset for the peri-urban area? To what extent may a peri-urban rail service be an attractiveness factor for peri-urban housing areas? In this work, we focus on a specific profile of private stakeholders: real estate professionals, for whom the primary strategy corresponds to economic foundations and territorial opportunities. Do they take into account political aspirations of rail enhancement in their real estate development strategies? How do they include accessibility to a peri-urban rail station in their promotion arguments? The field study is composed of three peri-urban cities served by rail services in the Lille metropolitan area (France). Indeed, the enhancement of rail services for these peri-urban territories is a key challenge of public land policies to contribute to manage cars flows towards the metropolis and to implement sustainable policy for this metropolitan area. Our work is based on the analysis of more than 500 property sales advertisements (old and new properties) collected from April 2019 to January 2020, and coupled with interviews of real estate agents. These data highlight that real estate professionals are aware that the presence of a railway station in cities located in the periphery of urban centers constitutes an undeniable asset for the residential attractiveness of the area, as well as its territorial reputation, generally induced by the social framework, the living environment and the area dynamism. Therefore, enhancing the railway station consists in mentioning the conditions of accessibility to the urban center from the property. Even if accessibility conditions are not the predominant criteria for the choice of accommodation, the promotional leaflets of new properties include the accessibility item, mainly expressed in terms of proximity to transport infrastructures. They always add a map integrating the road network and the railway station, and they qualify this notion of proximity. The analysis of the semantic field of proximity shows that road accessibility to the urban center is often expressed in terms of kilometers while access by train to centrality is evaluated in travel time. This writing choice reflects the fact that real estate professionals take into account road congestion of the main axes converging to Lille. These stakeholders therefore consider that it is wiser not to sell car accessibility to the urban center in terms of travel time. Conversely, advertisements of old properties published on the net will rather favor a global wording based on the notion of proximity to all amenities, the station being one in the same way as a school, as personal services, or any other amenity ... without specifying what they really mean by proximity. This way of speaking evasively about the notion of proximity is also a strategic choice since professionals want to avoid the parallelism between proximity of a rail station and disturbance. Indeed, the interviews testify the existence of a certain mistrust or cautious from people looking for accommodation concerning the proximity of equipment that could cause some pollution or noise nuisances. Therefore, the choice not to specify more precisely the notion of proximity to a rail station in ads might be interpreted as a way to manage this distrust. Finally, we should remember that the primary interest of these professionals using websites to promote properties is to catch the attention of future buyers. This work underlines that, in France, real estate professionals working in peri-urban areas seek to include the principles of territorial enhancement challenges in their real estate promotion marketing. This strategic position of private stakeholders may then be interpreted as a certain consideration of the challenge of adapting their economic strategy with ecological transition issues driven by French laws.

Domaines

Géographie
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Dates et versions

halshs-03152367, version 1 (25-02-2021)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-03152367 , version 1

Citer

Sophie Hasiak. Strategies of private stakeholders for enhancing railway stations in peri-urban areas: focus on real estate professionals. 48th European Transport Conference (on line), Sep 2020, Milano, Italy. ⟨halshs-03152367⟩

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