Railroad Infrastructure and City: Changeable Spatial Connection from Paradigms of Science, Urban Historiography and Urban Planning

Spatial environments composed of railroad and city have experienced a relationship which has varied in time. There has been a series of historical cycles that have witnessed a fluctuating interrelation: from pleasant articulation between nineteenth-century public spaces and railroad infrastructures, going through the controversial coexistence noticed by functionalist urban planning between the two fields, and up to the recent urban integration of obsolete infrastructures. With a culturalist approach, contemporary urban historiography reinterprets these episodes in light of the geomorphologic persistence of infrastructures, despite the variations in their usage cycles. The objective of this article is to tackle those historic units in synchrony, in order to make them interact with the historical context that has allowed a homogeneous cut. Our interpretation is that the determination of those historical units has been impacted by social science paradigms, predominant historiographic patterns and dominant urban principles. They have brought about breaks in the way of approaching spatial relationships between infrastructure and city when creating discontinuities in the production of disciplinary knowledge and in the ways of conceiving the urban. We will attempt to reflect upon those paradigmatic changes and their segmental role in urban historiography.