162 Critical Planning Summer 2006 Critical Planning Summer 2009 ...

162 

Critical Planning Summer 2009 2006

The Renaissance of Inner-City Rail 

Station Areas: A Key Element in 

Contemporary Urban Restructuring 

Dynamics 

Deike Peters 

Rail station area redevelopment mega-projects are key instances of planned, large-scale, strategic 

interventions into the contemporary urban fabric aimed at better connecting and revitalizing 

key inner-city locales. They represent a crucially under-studied element in the postindustrial 

restructuring of urban cores. In theory, mixed-used developments around centrally located rail 

stations offer a perfect answer to the challenges of a future-oriented, post-peak oil, sustainable 

development agenda focused on transit-accessible urban cores. In practice, however, the implementation 

of such mega-projects is highly complex, and the costs and benefits are unevenly distributed. 

This article presents comparative insights gained from three current high-profile cases 

in Berlin (Central Station [Hauptbahnhof]), London (King’s Cross), and New York (Penn/Moynihan 

Station). 

Contextualizing Rail Station Area Redevelopments as Crucial “Urban Renaissance” Mega- 

Projects in Times of Post-Fordist, Postindustrial Urban Restructuring 

A primary aim of urban scholarship is a more sophisticated understanding of the complex dynamics of 

urbanization under the present conditions of a globalized capitalism and the emergence of a “network 

society” (Castells 1996). These dynamics are variously referred to as postindustrial, postmodern, post- 

Fordist, or neoliberal urban restructuring (Keil 1998; Scott and Soja 1996; Smith 2002; Brenner and 

Theodore 2002). In the face of a complex interplay of simultaneous processes of de- and re-territorialization 

decisively altering cities’ spatial configurations, roles, functions, and regulatory environments (Amin 1994; 

Sassen 1991), new normative visions and discourses on “good” or “sustainable” urban forms are emerging. 

The focus of this paper is on transit-related nodal spaces, specifically inner-city rail stations, which are highly 

symbolic spaces for urban restructuring. The dynamics of rail station area redevelopment efforts represent an 

understudied phenomenon in critical urban studies today. Comparative case studies of rail station redevelopment 

mega-projects can help us better understand the specifics of contemporary urban restructuring processes 

and related “urban renaissance” planning agendas. The term “urban renaissance” is often indiscriminately used 

to encompass any redevelopment effort aimed at making inner cities more attractive places to work, live, 

study, or engage in entertainment and recreation by revitalizing a centrally located, transit-accessible urban 

Critical Planning Summer 2009 163

location. A more specific, stronger definition would 

also take into account improved urban design quality 

and mixed land uses, as well as a “greater environmental 

sensitivity and commitment to urbanity” in the 

planning and implementation of these “new megaprojects” 

(Diaz Orueta and Fainstein 2008, 759). This 

article presents three high-profile rail mega-projects 

from Berlin, London, and New York, highlighting 

their common traits and key contextual differences. 1 

The ongoing remaking of urban cores through urban 

redevelopment mega-projects is part and parcel of 

the “urbanization of neoliberalism” (Brenner and 

Theodore 2002) and post-Fordist restructuring. 

Large-scale manufacturing employment and production 

have given way to an urban economy dominated 

by service-, knowledge-, and consumption-based 

industries (Harvey 1989). The heightened competition 

for investments forces cities’ governing elites to 

search proactively for new opportunities of economic 

growth, leading to processes of disembedding (Castells 

1996), the emergence of new “geographies of centrality” 

(Sassen 1991), and a shift from a “managerial” 

to an “entrepreneurial” governance approach (Harvey 

1989; Dangschat 1992). Meanwhile, new logistics 

and distribution gateways and terminals are emerging 

at the edges of large metropolitan areas (Hesse 2008). 

Central cities are gaining ground as key locales for 

capitalist consumption and culture. Urban cores are 

(re-)gentrified as attractive tourist spaces (Judd and 

Fainstein 1999; Hoffman et al. 2003; Hannigan 

1999) and as prime living and working spaces for the 

“creative class” (Florida 2002). An updated version of 

urban “growth machine politics” emerges (Molotch 

1976; Logan and Molotch 1987; Savitch and Kantor 

2002) which, in Europe, is strongly related to the EU 

Lisbon Agenda and corresponding national politics. 

The specifics of these processes need to be understood 

through solid macro- and micro-level analyses that 

feature in-depth comparative case studies of particular 

places and actors within particular cities. There is not 

one single dominant theory on contemporary urban 

restructuring, of course. Rather, there are several 

strands of literature vying for prominence, each contributing 

certain key insights to the complex subject 

matter and presenting sometimes-conflicting views on 

the same cities. 2 Nevertheless, there is wide agreement 

among urban scholars that postindustrial, post-Fordist, 

neoliberal restructuring represents a double-edged 

sword for cities. High-speed communication and 

transportation infrastructures enable corporations to 

avoid the high land costs and negative agglomeration 

externalities associated with high-profile central city 

locations and relocate elsewhere. However, for many 

key, high-profile economic activities, “place still matters” 

(Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2004). 

Sassen (1991) first showed how advanced producer 

and financial services remain clustered in urban cores, 

and how certain centralizing tendencies in fact intensify 

in “global cities” that represent the most strategic 

command and control centers of the global economy. 3 

Currently, there are two distinct literatures on 

urban mega-projects. On one hand, there is a 

recent literature on infrastructure mega-projects 

that delivers profound critiques of irresponsible 

and inefficient public investment strategies and 

policies, particularly in the transportation sector 

(Altshuler and Luberoff 2003; Flyvbjerg et al. 

2003; Flyvbjerg et al. 2008). Unfortunately, these 

contributions mostly focus on highways, tunnels, 

or rail lines and have little to say about rail stations 

and their related urban redevelopment impacts. 

164 


On the other hand, there is an extensive urban redevelopment 

literature, often focusing on projects such as 

large shopping malls, stadiums, urban entertainment 

centers, or other high-profile “starchitecture” flagship 

projects as typical urban interventions in globalized, 

postindustrial times of international locational competition. 

And such flagship projects often form part 

of comprehensive, mixed-use mega-projects situated 

in central urban waterfront or other grey- and brownfield 

locations, which can include either abandoned 

or active railyards. Recent scholarly contributions by 

Moulaert, Rodriguez, and Swyngedouw (2005) and 

Salet and Gualini (2007) explicitly acknowledge the 

strategic dimensions of urban redevelopment megaprojects 

in Europe and the key role of the public sector. 

4 Post-Fordist restructuring leads to complex new 

spatial hierarchies within metropolitan areas where 

locations in the very center of the city often experience 

a boost at the expense of other, more secondary 

locations within the densified urban core. Hence the 

general need to develop a more sophisticated typology 

of strategic urban redevelopment mega-projects 

with rail station projects as an important subset. 

Meanwhile, complex processes of spatial and socioeconomic 

restructuring are further complicated by 

a wide-ranging re-scaling of urban governance and 

statehood (see esp. Brenner 2004 and Jessop 2002; 

Pierre 1999). This includes an increased recognition 

and integration of private actors and interests in decision-making 

processes, and an increased institutionalization 

of different forms of cooperation between 

government, businesses, and other non-governmental 

agencies, superseding Fordist relationships of mutuality 

between cities and national accumulation regimes 

(e.g., Heinelt and Mayer 1992; Mayer 1994). New 

high-profile rail station area developments such as 

the Euralille TGV interchange in Lille or the Ørestad 

land grid near Copenhagen have been identified as 

key examples of “premium (or secessionist) network 

spaces” 5 (Graham and Marvin 2001) and as “premium 

infrastructural configurations” (Brenner 2004, 

248–50) which were created as a result of targeted, 

“re-scaled,” customized, special-purpose, and placespecific 

regulatory interventions. Rail station redevelopment 

projects are prime illustrations of the complex 

new “interscalar” governance arrangements that have 

emerged in post-Keynesian, postindustrial urban 

regions. Meanwhile, public sector interventions for 

these rail nodes will always be dependent on private 

developers and rail companies as key strategic partners 

and drivers behind the development of these sites. 

Overall, the period since the early 1980s is typically 

characterized as an era of incrementalism and fragmentation 

during which urban planners, in the new 

context of a “co-operative state” (e.g., Benz 1997), have 

become largely dependent on achieving their limited 

planning goals through a focus on individual flagship 

mega-projects and big events (“festivalization”) (e.g., 

Carrière and Demazière 2002; Häußermann and 

Siebel 1993). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a 

majority of urban leaders and decision-makers favored 

a politics of piecemeal, opportunistic, flexible, entrepreneurial, 

and project-oriented urban management 

that typically lent big corporations and developers 

broad control over central urban locations. In many 

cases, influential semi-public or privatized development 

agencies were forged out of former state-owned 

authorities such as railway companies or port authorities. 

Extensive planning efforts and public subsidies 

were targeted towards the renewal, expansion, and 

upgrading of high-quality public transportation, telecommunications, 

and utility infrastructures in select 


urban areas (see esp. Brenner 2004, 243–253; Graham 

and Marvin 2001; Häußermann and Simons 2000), 

but they supposedly remained “poorly integrated 

into the wider urban process and planning system” 

(Swyngedouw, Moulaert, and Rodriguez 2002, 542). 

Over the past decade or so, the pendulum seems 

to have swung back in favor of strategic planning 

approaches (Albrechts, Healey, and Kunzmann 

2003; Healey et al. 1997; Hamedinger et al. 2008; 

Wiechmann 2008). These approaches aim at more 

ambitious, more comprehensive, and more integrated 

efforts to successfully remake city-regions (and most 

prominently their core areas) for the demands of a 

21 st -century economy and society. This has not, mind 

you, meant an abandonment of the mega-projects 

approach, but just that individual, single-purpose 

flagship projects are now often more carefully and 

more ambitiously contextualized within larger 

strategic master plans for high-profile, billion-dollar, 

multi-purpose, mixed-use mega-project complexes 

(Bianchini et al. 1992; Carrière and Demazière 2002; 

Demazière et al. 1998). In this context, rail station 

area redevelopment projects have to be contextualized 

against alternative redevelopment mega-projects. 

Unlike most de-industrializing harbors, waterfronts, 

and other central brownfield sites, rail stations still 

have a continuing function and use attached to 

them. More importantly, rail mega-projects are both 

major real estate projects and public infrastructure 

projects at the same time, with a potential to significantly 

affect and restructure mobility patterns 

in the wider metropolitan area and beyond. This 

fact has been underappreciated in the literature. 

So in theory, mixed-used developments around 

centrally located rail stations offer a perfect answer 

to many of the challenges of a future-oriented “urban 

renaissance” agenda. In practice, however, there are 

many difficulties with this idealistic vision. For one, 

there is no unified set of “urban renaissance” goals or 

a unified discourse among the relevant actors. Public 

officials might emphasize public interest goals such 

as livable, affordable housing units while transport 

experts might care most about issues of effective 

and sustainable urban mobility and connectivity. 

Historic preservationists might emphasize specific 

urban design aspects and object to removing old 

structures on the site. Environmentalists are usually 

skeptical about any mega-structures and would prefer 

low-impact solutions instead. Meanwhile, railway 

companies and real estate developers might simply 

be interested in the most profitable commercially 

viable solution, and thus not subscribe to any strong 

version of an “urban renaissance” agenda at all. 

Due to these divergent interests among the involved 

actors, the practical implementation of these megaproject 

developments is always highly complex and 

typically fraught with myriad difficulties. Meanwhile, 

no comprehensive international study of the challenges, 

potentials, successes, and failures of rail station 

redevelopment mega-projects currently exists. 

The most important initial work on the subject by 

Luca Bertolini (Bertolini 1996, 1998; Bertolini and 

Spit 1998) is now more than ten years old. More 

importantly, this work was limited to comparing 

a handful of rail station area redevelopment plans 

across Europe. By far the best recent treatment of the 

subject is an edited volume published by Bruinsma et 

al. (2008), but the empirical outlook is based almost 

exclusively on recent policies and developments in the 

Netherlands, with some additional western European 

examples. The normative, urban design-focused 

166 


concept of a “renaissance of rail stations” in western 

Europe (specifically Germany) was promoted in the 

1997 volume Renaissance der Bahnhöfe. This volume 

was published as a companion to the German biennial 

building exhibition with the same name, but 

none of the contributions were based upon original 

empirical research. Bartkowiak (2004) looked at a 

handful of different rail station area redevelopment 

projects in Germany, but the related case studies 

were brief, overly descriptive, and covered projects 

that have since been abandoned. 6 Meanwhile, 

Wucherpfennig (2005) used a discourse-analytical 

“new cultural geography” perspective to critique 

the rail station restructuring concepts promoted 

by Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) since the 1990s. 

There are also some selected case studies of rail station 

areas as part of larger studies of redevelopment 

mega-projects (e.g., Simons 2003; Fainstein 2001). 

Other singular case studies are limited to certain 

specific aspects of the rail station redevelopment. 7 

All of this contrasts with a much larger literature 

on waterfront and harbor redevelopment, however, 

where coverage through both in-depth individual 

case studies and internationally comparative research 

is much more prominent. (For a good overview see 

Schubert 2002; for other recent German contributions 

also see Schubert and Polinna 2007; Pütz and 

Rehner 2007; and the case studies in Dziomba 2008). 

Harborfront redevelopments have received more attention 

from urban theory scholars because they have 

been more prominently redeveloped as prime tourist 

and creative spaces that include residential uses. 

Rail Station Redevelopment Mega-Projects in 

Berlin, London, and New York 

Qualitative, case-oriented approaches produce findings 

derived from real-world settings where the “phenomenon 

of interest unfolds naturally” (Patton 2001, 

39; see also Ragin 1987). Researchers have to navigate 

a delicate balance between the need for a consistent 

research design and the need to remain sensitive to 

the particularities of each case. Issues of convergence 

and divergence, and locally and nationally divergent 

paths must be expected and explicitly acknowledged 

(Flyvbjerg 2006; Pierre 2005; John 2005; Denters 

and Mossberger 2006; Kantor and Savitch 2005). 

The three cases below represent one specific type 

of rail station area redevelopment, namely highprofile 

comprehensive mega-projects involving 

major inner-city rail stations in major metropolises. 

All three cases are really multi-part mega-projects 

consisting of a transport infrastructure component 

and one or more urban redevelopment components. 

The related planning processes are naturally 

extremely complex, involving many public, publicprivate, 

and civil society actors with both converging 

and diverging interests. Specifically, all three 

cases exhibit the following common characteristics: 

• The stations are located in major, leading 

European and North American urban 

regions (“world/globalizing cities”) 

with a multi-nodal, polycentric structure. 

• The rail stations are central terminals located 

in central urban locations in or immediately 

adjacent to the inner city or downtown area. 

• The actual stations were/are to be completely 

or substantially rebuilt and the 


ebuilding, restoration, or redevelopment 

of the active station can be considered 

a “flagship” element of the entire 

rail station area redevelopment process. 

• The integration and connectivity of local, regional, 

national, and international travel was/ 

is a major impetus for the redevelopment. 

• The rail stations are already operational as 

hubs for high-speed inter-regional travel. 

• The area around the station is a major, 

high-profile, mixed-use redevelopment 

site for which official planning documents 

and a master plan exist and for which a 

limited number of large real estate companies, 

together with public, semi-public, 

and non-profit actors, are currently seeking 

a wide-ranging redevelopment of the area. 

But note that the rail station redevelopment 

areas are not the only—and not 

necessarily even the biggest—redevelopment 

projects in the urban region (differentiating 

them from Euralille or Stuttgart 21). 

• The project timelines of the projects are 

roughly similar in that crucial proposals 

for the urban redevelopment of the 

sites were presented in the early 1990s, 

hit various setbacks, and got back on 

track towards realization in the 2000s. 

There is thus a relatively high degree of comparability 

among the cases. The cases provide insights into the 

particular challenges and difficulties in successfully creating 

attractive, high-quality, mixed-use sites at major 

rail stations in a complex urban situation where several 

alternative, large-scale urban redevelopment projects 

are simultaneously vying for (or already have gained) 

prominence at other central inner-city locations. 

Significant differences between the cases and their local 

and national context remain, of course. Germany and 

Britain are both countries with extensive intra- and 

inter-urban passenger rail systems, whereas the United 

States is not. New York’s large and dense regional 

passenger rail network is thus exceptional within its 

own national system, and the Acela high-speed rail 

service between Boston, New York, and Washington 

is in fact the only one of its kind in the nation. There 

are also country- and state-specific contexts to the 

overall politics of urban redevelopment. Berlin’s urban 

economy is significantly smaller and less dynamic 

than that of the other two cities. However, due to the 

fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, the 

dynamism in the overall restructuring of the urban 

landscape in Berlin has been closer to that of the other 

cities than the size of its local economy would suggest, 

and the construction of the new Berlin Central 

Station and the related underground infrastructures 

is one of the most important and spectacular recent 

cases of rail station area-based redevelopment. 

The tables on the next two pages summarize 

information on the three case study cities and 

the projects. Additional details on the transport 

infrastructure and urban redevelopment components 

of the three projects are presented below. 

1. The new Berlin Central Station (Hauptbahnhof), 

and the Redevelopment of the Lehrter Stadtquartier/ 

Heidestrasse and the Humboldthafen 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the 

168 


The Three Cities Compared 

Berlin London New York 

City Population 13 3.4 million 7.5 million 8 million 

Region Population 13 6 million 12–19 million 18–20 million 

Urban Area 13 891 km 2 1600 km 2 830 km 2 

Urban Density 8 3,800 pop/km 2 4,800 pop/km 2 9,600 pop/km 2 

Urban-regional Structure 13 Strong, multi-nodal 

urban core with a steep 

density gradient 

Strong, multi-nodal 

urban core with a 

modestly steep density 

gradient 

Strong, multi-nodal 

urban core with a very 

steep density gradient 

Gross City Product 13 US$33,170 per capita US$49,000 per capita US$56,106 per capita 

Urban Economy Size and 

Rank 9 

Economy (Trend) Was slowly growing 

again before the 

international crisis 

World City Status10 Gamma-level 

Cultural World City 

Status in National Urban 

System 

Urban Politics: Mayor’s 

Approach and Party Affiliation 

US$75 billion, 69 th US$452 billion, 6 th US$1.133 trillion, 2 nd 

(after Tokyo) 

National capital, 

largest city in Germany 

Fairly progressive, 

Social Democrat 

Growing, if not as 

dynamically as before 

Alpha-level Full 

Service World City 


largest city in UK 

Independent/Labour 

until recently, now 

conservative 

Growing, but 

international recession 

affects prospects 

Alpha-level Full 

Service World City 


largest city in US 

Entrepreneurial, 

Independent/ 

Republican 


The Three Railway Station Sites 

Berlin 

Hauptbahnhof 

The Rail Station as a “Space of Flow” 

Nodal Functions? - Inter-city: ICE, i.e., 

(inter-)national hi-speed 

- Regional Rail 

- Local (S-Bahn, Bus) 

New Rail 

Infrastructures Part 

of Rebuilding Plans? 

Rebuilding of Train 

Station Building(s)? 

Yes: multi-billion $ tunnel 

connection (opened May 

2006). Still missing: 

North-south S-Bahn 

21, U-Bahn 5/55, tram 

connections 

Yes, entire station was 

newly constructed for 

more than €1.2 billion 

(opened May 2006) 

London 

King’s Cross/St. Pancras 

- Inter-city: Eurostar, 

international hi-speed 


- Local (Tube, Bus) 

Yes: Eurostar highspeed 

rail link (opened 

November 2007) 

Yes, ₤800-million 

restoration including a 

new Eurostar Terminal 

at St. Pancras (opened 

November 2007) and the 

new ₤400-million Western 

Concourse at King’s Cross 

(until 2012) 

Passenger Volumes 300,000 passengers/day N/A (combined 

annual ticket sales for 

regional rail: 25 million 

passengers/year, 

excluding tube volumes) 

The Rail Station Area as a “Space of Place” 

Location Inner-city, adjacent to 

new federal government 

quarter (across the Spree 

River) 

Site Characteristics Station area sites are 

largely undeveloped/not 

built-up with significant 

structures 

Redevelopment 

History of the Site 

Current 

Redevelopment 

Redevelopment interest 

started after fall of the 

Wall in 1989, several 

plans and proposals since 

“Lehrter Stadtquartier” 

and “Heidestrasse” by 

Vivico, “Humboldthafen” 

by Liegenschaftsfonds 

Berlin 

Inner-city, in densely 

built-up neighborhoods 

(Camden and Islington) 

Station area site contains 

buildings for (light) 

industrial use, a nature 

park, and undeveloped 

parts 

Several incarnations of 

redevelopment initiatives 

since the 1980s and 

1990s 

“King’s Cross Central” by 

Argents St George 

New York City 

Penn/Moynihan Station 

- Inter-city: Acela, i.e., 

inter-regional hi-speed 


- Local (Metro, Bus) 

Yes: 7 th Avenue subway 

extension (planned, but 

not approved yet) 

Yes, the multi-billion dollar 

plans involve moving 

(parts) of the station one 

block west and erecting 

a new building at the 

current site 

550,000 passengers/day 

Inner-city, in midtown 

Manhattan 

Station area site is 

built-up, redevelopment 

involves tear-down and/ 

or re-use of other large 

buildings 

Initial proposal by Senator 

Moynihan in 1993, 

several different versions 

since 

“Moynihan Station West/ 

MSG” (at Farley) and 

“Moynihan Station East” 

(at Penn) by Vornado and 

Related Co. 

170 


Figure 1: Interior view of Berlin’s new Central Station (Hauptbahnhof). 

Source: © Deutsche Bahn. 

reunification of Germany in 1990, Berlin became 

subject to massive processes of urban restructuring. 

Multiple master plan and urban design competitions 

were held for the high-profile “starchitecture”-oriented 

mega-project redevelopment of Potsdamer Platz led 

by Sony and Daimler (Lehrer 2002; Roost 2008), as 

well as for the new government quarter around the 

Reichstag Building and the Brandenburg Gate. But 

Berlin suffered from severe economic decline and 

high unemployment, coupled with maladministration 

and decreased federal subsidies, leaving the city-state 

effectively bankrupt in the late 1990s (Krätke 2004; 

Mayer 2002). All attempts to position Berlin as a 

leading “global city” and internationally renowned 

service metropolis remained unfulfilled, even before 

the global financial crisis (Cochrane and Jones 1999; 

Figure 2: Aerial view of the redevelopment areas around 

Berlin Central Station and the Humboldt Harbor basin (This 

rendering does not show the vast Heidestrasse site north of 

the station, but it illustrates the area’s close proximity to the 

Chancellery, Reichstag, and Brandenburg Gate on the other 

side of the Spree River.). Source: © Berlin Partner GmbH. 

Läpple 2006). 11 The local government places strong 

emphasis on integrating private actors and interests in 

the realization of ambitious development plans, and a 

series of strategic plans exemplify the city’s unbowed 

reliance on visionary and comprehensive plan making. 

1.1 Berlin Central Station (Hauptbahnhof ): The 

Transport Infrastructure Mega-Project 

The decision to build the new Hauptbahnhof as a new 

central crossing station at the approximate location of 

the former Lehrter Urban Rail Station was the realization 

of a long-time dream of Berlin transport planners 

and engineers. A key decision was made in the 

early 1990s to construct a new billion-dollar tunnel 


underneath the Spree River and the Tiergarten Park 

as the centerpiece of a comprehensive restructuring of 

the metropolitan rail transport infrastructure system 

(see also Peters 2008). Berlin’s rail infrastructure had 

been divided and neglected after World War II, and no 

central crossing station existed for regional and intraregional 

travel. The Berlin Hauptbahnhof was built 

for €1.2 billion as a new flagship rail station designed 

to impress as a piece of both architecture and engineering. 

Advertised by the German Rail as “the largest 

and most modern crossing station in Europe,” it was 

officially opened after years of delays in May 2006 to 

coincide with the World Cup. The new station, with 

fourteen platforms at two different levels, is supposedly 

frequented by 300,000 passengers and by 1,100 

long-distance and regional trains per day. (These figures 

include local surface rail S-Bahn traffic, however.) 

It is also home to 161,000 square feet of retail space 

on three levels with extended shopping hours. But 

three years after opening, the station remains unconnected 

to the local underground and light-rail systems. 

1.2 Berlin Central Station Area: The Urban 

Redevelopment Mega-Project(s) 

Given its proximity to the former Berlin Wall, the 

area around the new station, located across the 

river from the new federal government quarter, 

largely consists of inner-city greyfields. While the 

area south of the river now features the Chancellery, 

the Norman Foster-upgraded Reichstag Parliament 

Building, and the refurbished Brandenburg Gate, 

the greyfields adjacent to the new Central Station 

are still awaiting redevelopment. The areas north and 

south of the station are controlled by the Vivico Real 

Estate Company. Vivico was founded by the German 

federal government in 2001 to market former railway 

properties. The fully privatized company, which has 

a total property portfolio of about 74 million square 

feet, was bought by the Austrian property company, 

CA Immo, in early December 2007. Vivico plans 

to develop the Lehrter Stadtquartier according to a 

master plan by the German architect Oswald Matthias 

Ungers. This plan consists of a grouping of seven 

separate buildings, including one tall office building, 

allowing for a total of 1,550,000 square feet of office 

space. A professional master plan competition for the 

northern Heidestrasse area is currently in progress; the 

competition guidelines supposedly foresee an overall 

development potential of up to 6,566,040 square feet 

for mixed uses. In 2007, the Heidestrasse site was also 

the subject of the annual Schinkel Competition for 

young architects, resulting in substantial attention and 

press coverage. The hub function of the train station 

is a central factor in Vivico’s marketing strategy. 12 The 

Humboldthafen (Humboldt Harbor) to the east of the 

station is being developed by the Liegenschaftsfonds 

Berlin, a real estate holding company owned by the 

state of Berlin. The Liegenschaftsfonds has developed 

a detailed master plan with specific planning 

restrictions for the three-hectare site and divided it 

into individual building lots that are to be sold off 

in phases. The total building volume is 1,270,690 

square feet, of which 30% is supposed to be housing. 

The sale and marketing of the high-profile lots is currently 

ongoing, with continued local press coverage. 

2. The Redevelopment of the King’s Cross and St. Pancras 

Station Area in London 

A city atop the global urban hierarchy of late capitalism, 

London has been in a perpetual state of spatial 

172 


Figure 3: King’s Cross Central mixed-use development illustrative 

build-out. Source: © Miller Hare/King’s Cross Central 

Limited Partnership. 

urban restructuring for decades. Much of this was 

accomplished via the execution of ambitious highprofile 

mega-projects. Recent examples include the 

redevelopment of the Docklands in the 1980s, the 

redesign of Paternoster Square around St. Paul’s 

Cathedral as well as other central squares (e.g., 

Leicester, Piccadilly Circus, and Trafalgar), the expansion 

of the center around Liverpool Street Station 

(Broadgate, Spitalfields Market, and Bishopsgate), 

the construction of the Millennium Bridge and 

Dome, and the opening of the Tate Modern Gallery 

(Bodenschatz 2005). Urban planning approaches have 

recently evolved from a deregulated approach in the 

Thatcher era, to an increasingly urban design-conscious 

approach in the late 1980s, to a first upswing 

in public sector-led initiatives before the millennium, 

and eventually to an increasing emphasis on urban 

re-centralization and a return to strategic planning 

during the Blair era. This also involved the creation 

Figure 4: Rendering of Granary Square, at the center of the 

King’s Cross Central redevelopment site. Source: © GMJ/ 

King’s Cross Central Limited Partnership. 

of the Greater London Authority and the election 

of Ken Livingston as mayor of London in 2000, as 

well as the publication of the London Plan in 2004. 

Moreover, the national New Labour government 

began propagating an “urban renaissance” agenda in 

the late 1990s (Bodenschatz 2006; Colomb 2007). 

2.1 King’s Cross and St. Pancras: The Transport 

Infrastructure Mega-Project 

In 1996, after many years of controversy and uncertainty, 

the government made the crucial decision 

to change the Eurostar high-speed rail terminus 

from Waterloo Station to St. Pancras and bring the 

Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) into the station 

at high grade. The CTRL was always explicitly expected 

to generate significant regeneration benefits 

in the area around the stations, most notably around 


St. Pancras/King’s Cross in inner-city London, 

but also along the so-called Thames Gateway at 

Stratford (the site for the 2012 London Olympics) 

and Ebbsfleet. The Eurostar’s arrival at St. Pancras 

brought about a multi-million dollar refurbishment 

of the station. Meanwhile, London Underground 

is undertaking a major upgrading of its tube links 

at King’s Cross/St. Pancras, the busiest link in the 

London tube network, while the Department of 

Transport, together with Network Rail, agreed to 

carry out major improvements to King’s Cross Station, 

including: the addition of a new platform, the construction 

of a completely new Western Concourse 

three times the current size, and the replacement 

of the old Southern Concourse with a piazza area. 

2.2 King’s Cross Central: The (Main) Urban 

Redevelopment Mega-Project 

The local authority of Camden has wanted to 

stimulate economic activity on the 134-acre site since 

the 1970s. It finally produced a strategy document 

calling for a comprehensive approach to the whole 

site in the mid 1980s that ambitiously limited office 

development in favor of relatively low-density mixed 

development (Fainstein 2001, 119). But the land was 

then controlled by the still publicly-owned British Rail 

and the privatized National Freight Consortium, and 

British Rail instead championed a proposal favoring 

over 6 million square feet of office space. A local 

community group opposing the plans, the King’s 

Cross Railway Lands Group, was established around 

that time, and remains active today. The proposal 

fell apart in the early 1990s, and the redevelopment 

of the site was later made impossible for many years 

because of the Channel link-related infrastructure 

works taking place on the site. But, anticipating the 

timely completion of the CTRL link into St. Pancras 

by late 2007, the local boroughs of Camden and 

Islington issued a comprehensive ninety-five-page 

planning and development brief for the King’s Cross 

Opportunity Area, detailing their mixed-use, “urban 

renaissance”-oriented development preferences for 

the site in 2004. Already in 2000, the development 

team, Argent St George had been selected as the 

preferred developer for the central portion of the 

site. In 2004, Argent St George, together with the 

site’s new owners (London Continental Railroad 

and the logistics firm, Excel), presented a detailed 

regeneration plan for a sixty-seven-acre redevelopment. 

This redevelopment featured 8 million square 

feet of mixed uses, including 5 million square feet 

of office space, 495,000 square feet of retail, up to 

2,000 new homes, twenty new streets, and multiple 

public spaces. The plans are awaiting implementation, 

now that the new Eurostar link is fully operational 

and the site is finally available for redevelopment. 

3. The Redevelopment of Penn/Moynihan Station in 

Midtown Manhattan 

Like London, New York is a first-rate global city 

(Sassen 1991; Fainstein 2001). The common critical 

urbanist narrative is that New York exemplifies local 

planning and governance’s function as a facilitator of 

neoliberal globalization by subsidizing business, displacing 

the urban poor, dismantling the local welfare 

state, and replacing long-term planning aimed at the 

public good for the benefit of short-term economic 

benefits for the city’s business elites (e.g., Sites 2003; 

Hackworth 2007). However, under the current administration 

of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the city 

174 


Figure 5: The Farley Post Office, the proposed future site of 

Moynihan Station. Source: © Annie Nyborg, 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/masnyc/345539757/ 

sizes/l/. 

has witnessed a return of comprehensive planning involving 

a heightened attention to strategic, long-term 

visions that explicitly address public interest goals. 

There is a recent proliferation of mega-projects of 

almost unprecedented scale and ambition. Commonly 

carried out in the name of economic progress, these 

projects include office, commercial, and housing 

developments. They also involve efforts to improve 

the city’s transport infrastructure, expand or enhance 

public space, or contribute in other ways to the city’s 

attractiveness as a place to visit, live, or work. Apart 

from Penn/Moynihan Station, several additional rail 

sites play a prominent role in the city’s recent renewal 

and restructuring efforts, particularly the Hudson 

Yards in Manhattan, the Atlantic Yards Terminal 

in central Brooklyn, and of course the rail hub at 

Ground Zero. These redevelopment projects exemplify 

the shift in New York’s development patterns 

and practices towards “big, long-term visions” (former 

Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, quoted in Fainstein 

2005, 1). The projects have also attracted considerable 

Figure 6: At one point, the complex, multi-billion-dollar urban 

redevelopment scheme even included plans for a relocation 

of Madison Square Garden. Source: © The New York Times. 

opposition, however, and are criticized for replicating 

many of the qualities that turned people against urban 

renewal in the 1960s and 1970s (Fainstein 2005, 2). 

3.1 Penn/Moynihan Station: The Transport Infrastructure 

Mega-Project 

The transport infrastructure and urban redevelopment 

elements are tightly interwoven in this case, and unlike 

in the Berlin and London cases, the station building 

has not been (re-)constructed yet. The original 1911 

Pennsylvania Station was demolished in 1964 to make 

room for Madison Square Garden, which still sits 

above the tracks. Despite million-dollar renovations 

carried out in the 1990s, Penn Station remains a badly 

lit, low-ceilinged, underground maze of tunnels and 

corridors, sharply contrasting with the adjacent Farley 

Post Office, the historic façade of which is reminiscent 

of the old Penn Station. Meanwhile, Penn Station 

serves up to 550,000 passengers a day (compared to 


140,000 at Grand Central Station), making it by far 

the busiest train station in all of North America. 13 

The station is home to intercity rail services operated 

by Amtrak along the busy Northeast Corridor, commuter 

rail services operated by New Jersey Transit and 

the Long Island Rail Road, and six different subway 

lines. Current plans to expand capacity as well as 

improve the efficiency and aesthetics of Penn Station 

include the following elements (see also RPA 2008): 

• Moynihan West: relocation of Amtrak services 

to the eastern end of the Farley Post Office; 

• Moynihan East: billion-dollar rehabilitation 

of the station under Madison Square 

Garden, including grand new entrances; 

• Moynihan North: multi-billion-dollar 

construction of a new NJ Transit terminus 

for the new Hudson River tunnel (ARC) 

arriving at 34 th street (This tunnel megaproject 

would double the number of trains 

coming into midtown from the west. 

The terminus is to have an underground 

pedestrian connection to Moynihan East.); 

• Moynihan South: multi-billion dollar 

construction of three new platforms 

and five new tracks under the block 

south of Penn Station (Block 780); 

• Relocation of 100,000 square feet of 

railroad backhouse operations offsite 

to increase circulation space. 

3.2 Penn/Moynihan Station: The Urban Redevelopment 

Mega-Project 

Penn Station is located in the heart of bustling and 

densely built-up midtown Manhattan, between 

7 th and 8 th Avenues and 31 st and 33 rd Streets. 

Redevelopment plans received a first major impetus 

in 1993 when long-time New York state senator, 

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, announced a concept to 

build a new Penn Station inside the structure of the 

historic Farley Post Office building one block west. 

Initial plans failed, but in 2005, the Hudson Yards 

rezoning was passed, creating a transit improvement 

bonus of up to 2.4 million square feet in addition 

to already existing air rights, designed to further 

incentivize development. That same year, the state 

selected Vornado Realty Trust and Related Companies 

to develop a new Moynihan Station at Farley. The 

details of the plans have undergone several changes 

since, with total costs once topping $3.2 billion. In 

2007, the Empire State Development Corporation 

(ESDC) purchased the Farley building for $230 

million from the US Postal Service and released a 

scoping document to initiate public review of an 

expanded project calling for a complex plan involving 

two new station buildings. The entire rezoning and 

redevelopment plan allowed for more than 5 million 

square feet of additional space, primarily for retail. 14 

Due to a financial shortfall of more than $1 billion, 

no agreement could be reached on the most ambitious 

version of the redevelopment plan, which would have 

included a relocation of Madison Square Garden to 

the west. These plans have since been toppled, and 

the Garden will be refurbished rather than relocated. 

176 


So What Kinds of “Urban Renaissances” 

Are We Talking About? 

The brief descriptions of the three case studies above 

obviously do not do justice to the complexities 

of the individual cases. They are merely designed 

to underscore the magnitude of the projects, the 

high stakes involved, and the great interest these 

locales have generated among leading politicians, 

planners, developers, and other stakeholders. 

This concluding section discusses the cases from 

a comparative perspective, highlighting some 

of the common threads and key differences. 

First off, the high-profile redevelopment of central rail 

stations and their surrounding areas in major cities on 

both sides of the Atlantic underlines the reinvigorated 

significance of rail-based infrastructures in the postmodern, 

postindustrial, post-Fordist urban regional 

fabric. Whereas modernist urbanism was strongly tied 

to a vision of a functionally segregated, car-oriented 

city, the emerging postmodern urbanism of the 21 st 

century is strongly linked to a vision of multi-nodal, 

polycentric urban regions featuring vibrant, attractive, 

walkable cores where commercial, residential, 

and leisure uses are not separated but mixed. 

The three projects also exemplify the new consensus 

which is emerging among transport experts, urban 

planners, and many political decision-makers: that 

in order to be sustainable, efficient, and successful in 

the future, cities and their surrounding regions need 

to be structured around high-capacity public transit 

networks, and that transport and land-use planning 

must be better integrated. Several decades of largescale 

investments in high-speed rail networks have 

already begun to alter both inter- and intra-urban 

connectivity in Europe. Thanks to the $8 billion 

in high-speed rail funding inserted into the federal 

stimulus package in February 2009, this policy also 

received an enormous boost in the United States. 

Meanwhile, the rise of a transit-oriented “New 

Urbanism” agenda in North America (Calthorpe and 

Fulton 2001; Cervero 2004; Dittmar and Ohland 

2003; Dunphy et al. 2005; Dutton 2000) and the 

corresponding “urban renaissance” discourse in 

Europe, especially in Great Britain (Bodenschatz 

2005; Bodenschatz 2006; Colomb 2007), provides 

decision-makers with strong, additional, normative 

policy momentum in favor of integrated, rail-based 

transport and land-use development, and hence also a 

strong impetus for rail station area redevelopment. In 

Britain, the 1999 Urban Task Force Report, “Towards 

an Urban Renaissance,” triggered an extensive debate 

over government-sponsored urban regeneration and 

over the unequally distributed benefits and social 

consequences of gentrification (Imrie and Raco 

2003). Many recent international case studies confirm 

that urban renaissance initiatives often exclude 

or displace vulnerable residents (Porter and Shaw 

2008; Punter 2009). Edwards (2009, 23) makes 

this point with specific reference to King’s Cross: 

The composition of the [King’s Cross Central 

redevelopment] scheme, particularly its limited 

provision of affordable social housing to 

rent and its strong provision of corporate office 

space, has been the main source of conflict. . . . 

Regeneration is not seen as primarily a process 

serving the low- and middle-income people in 

whose name regeneration policy was developed: 

rather it is seen . . . as essentially a business activity 

aimed at growth and competitiveness (Edwards 

2009, 23). 

This certainly also rings true in New York and Berlin. 


However, inner-city housing has remained comparatively 

affordable in Berlin, so there is less public outrage 

over the prospect that moderately-priced subsidized 

housing might play a relatively minor role in redevelopment 

plans at prime locations near the station. 

Meanwhile, the physical renaissance of grandiose railway 

buildings unquestionably carries strong symbolic 

meaning. The 20 th -century automobile age is over. 

Today, “peak oil” threatens to affect future air and car 

travel. In this context, inner-city railway stations shed 

their grimy image and remake themselves into glitzy, 

high-speed travel hubs. They once again become a 

preferred locus for representative “public” architecture, 

be it via the extensive remodeling of existing 

architectural gems (St. Pancras), the new construction 

of expensive glass palaces (Berlin Hauptbahnhof), 

or complex rebuilding efforts (Moynihan Station). 

In all cases, however, critics complain about the 

overly sanitized and highly commercialized atmosphere 

in the new stations. Upon entering the Berlin 

Hauptbahnhof, for example, visitors are essentially 

forced into a multi-story mall, the internal layout of 

which optimizes pedestrian throughput past shops. 

Interestingly, with a few exceptions (Euralille probably 

being the most important one), rail station sites’ 

attractiveness as new locations for businesses, leisure 

and entertainment, or residential uses still depends 

much more on their local and regional connectivity 

than on their long-distance connections. For example, 

Penn Station’s attractiveness as a redevelopment site 

has comparatively little to do with Amtrak’s longdistance 

Acela service, but everything to do with its 

function as the most important transit hub in the 

entire metro region. Conversely, the fact that the 

Berlin Hauptbahnhof is still relatively disconnected 

from the rest of the city and its dense local transit 

system partially explains why the redevelopment of 

the area is still lagging. By the late 1990s, it became 

increasingly clear that the city was not growing as 

originally predicted. The office and retail markets 

were becoming overbuilt, and demand was limited, so 

planners and politicians gave priority to other largescale 

redevelopment initiatives, especially around 

the Alexanderplatz transit hub and along the Spree 

waterfront in the east. In New York, efforts to redevelop 

Penn Station are currently competing with the 

gigantic Hudson Yards redevelopment “giga-project” 

immediately to the west, the Atlantic Yards project 

in Brooklyn, and the rebuilding of Ground Zero. 

And the experience of King’s Cross in London in 

the early 1990s, when the first major redevelopment 

plan fell apart, further underscores the volatility of 

these mega-projects to the whims of globally connected 

local economies and real estate markets. 

Railway mega-projects have doubtlessly emerged as 

crucial loci for trans-scalar urban-regional policymaking. 

An important aspect for future comparative 

study is the ability of different actors to shape or 

affect the overall project setup and outcomes. Aside 

from planners and politicians, this particularly 

concerns the roles of transportation agencies and 

authorities, privatized railway companies, and private 

developers. On the surface, the presented cases seem 

indicative of a “roll-out neoliberalism” (Peck and 

Tickell 2002) in which the pursuit of various public 

interest goals, such as providing a safe and efficient 

transportation system, or creating representative 

public spaces in the urban core, is handed over to 

private or privatized profit-seeking actors. But it 

is also crucial to reiterate that railway stations and 

their pertaining infrastructures are gigantic public 

178 


works projects dependent on hundreds of millions 

or even billions of dollars in support from federal 

and state governments (including so-called “budget 

neutral” expenses such as precious air development 

rights). There is thus an inherent obligation on the 

part of public officials and public servants to maximize 

the tangible public benefits of these projects. 

The trickiness is that these benefits are both hard to 

quantify and unevenly distributed across space and 

time. How does one quantify the symbolic value 

of a “reborn” or newly built railway station full of 

architectural splendor? These new-yet-old “cathedrals 

of mobility” certainly inspire civic pride and 

quickly become sites of interest to visitors and locals 

alike. But admiration and awe alone hardly trigger 

persistent changes in people’s mobility patterns, so 

unless these redevelopment efforts are coupled with 

individually tangible benefits to the way people move 

about (or dwell) in the city, it becomes difficult to 

justify the often staggering cost of these new pieces 

of “starchitecture.” And in densely populated, widely 

transit-accessible city-regions such as New York, 

London, or Berlin, there are definite opportunity costs 

to concentrating billions of dollars of both public and 

private funds at select privileged nodes. Sustainable 

transport activists therefore typically argue that the 

“renaissance” and livability of the city as a whole 

would receive a bigger boost if funds were instead applied 

towards improving local bus, rail, bicycle, or pedestrian 

infrastructures as well as regional rail services. 

The case of Berlin also dramatically illustrates that 

unless the rail station itself is properly intermodally 

integrated with the rest of the transit system, rail station 

proximity does not necessarily equal good (local) 

accessibility. Both in Berlin and London, due to the 

sites’ vast expanses and complex terrains, the stations 

themselves are not necessarily in convenient walking 

distance to all sections of the redevelopment areas. 

So, in the end, inner-city railway station area redevelopment 

initiatives evoke ambivalent reactions 

among critical urbanists. The initiatives harbor 

much potential to serve as flagship developments 

for a new visionary future, but as always, the 

devil lies in the details. To date, much of their 

positive potential remains contested or unrealized. 

Deike Peters is director of the DFG Research Group, 

“Megaprojects,” at Berlin University of Technology’s 

Center for Metropolitan Studies (www.megaprojects. 

metropolitanstudies.de). 

Lead Photograph 

Berlin’s new Central Station (Hauptbahnhof), “The 

largest and most modern central crossing station in 

Europe.” Source: © Wolfgang Staudt, http://www. 

flickr.com/photos/wolfgangstaudt/2812991484/ 

sizes/l/. 

Notes 

1 Please note that both projects (or at least major components 

thereof) and the related research are still in progress, 

and that this paper merely attempts to summarize early 

insights from what will be a multi-year research endeavor. 

2 Note that only a minor portion of all this literature is com- 


parative in nature. If it is, it generally includes two or at most 

three cases (most prominently Saskia Sassen’s authoritative 

“Global City” treatise on New York, London, and Tokyo, 

as well as Janet Abu-Lughod’s study of New York, Chicago, 

and Los Angeles as “America’s Global Cities”). 

3 In fact, simultaneous processes of dispersal and re-centralization 

affect all “globalizing” cities with significant ties 

to the global economy, not just those at the very top of the 

global urban hierarchy (e.g., Keil 1993; Brenner and Keil 

2006). The more encompassing term, “globalizing,” coined 

by Marcuse and van Kempen similarly reinforces the notion 

that “globalization is a process, not a state” (Marcuse and 

van Kempen 2000, xvii). 

4 Yet their insights are limited to a western European 

perspective and mostly focused on second- or third-tier 

metropolises (e.g., Lisbon, Naples, Copenhagen). Moreover, 

many of their case studies deal with urban subcenters rather 

than the inner city (e.g., the Amsterdam Zuidas Station as 

opposed to Central Station). 

5 “Premium (or secessionist) network spaces” are defined 

as “a combination of urban and networked spaces that are 

configured precisely to the needs of socioeconomically 

wealthy groups and so at the same time are increasingly 

withdrawn from the wider citizenry and cityscape” (See 

Graham and Marvin 2001, 427). 

6 The case studies only covered pages 275–336 of the study 

and included descriptions of the following five projects: 

Bremen Promotion Park, Essen Passarea, Frankfurt 21, 

Munich 21, and Stuttgart 21. 

7 Two examples are Holgerson’s (2007) master’s thesis on 

King’s Cross, which focuses on class conflict, and Thammaruangsri’s 

(2003) Ph.D. dissertation in architecture, which 

uses space syntax to analyze rail stations in central London. 

8 All data and figures were assembled from the Urban Age 

documentation website put together by urban researchers 

at the London School of Economics, see www.urban-age. 

net (accessed March 7, 2008). 

9 All figures were taken from http://www.citymayors.com/ 

statistics/richest-cities-2005.html (accessed January 4, 

2008). GDP figures include cities and their surrounding 

urban areas in 2005 and were based on PricewaterhouseCoopers 

estimates as well as UN urban agglomeration definitions 

and population estimates. 

10 This categorization is taken from the frequently quoted 

1999 GaWC Inventory of World Cities, according to which 

London and New York, along with Paris and Tokyo, are 

the leading Alpha-level global cities in the world, with Los 

Angeles and five other cities completing the Alpha-group 

of “full service world cities.” This group is followed by ten 

Beta-level “major world cities” (e.g., San Francisco and 

Mexico City). The list is then completed by a group of 

about thirty-five Gamma-level “minor” world cities, which 

includes Berlin. 

11 With a gross domestic product (GDP) of US$74 billion 

in 2002, Berlin still managed a place amidst the top ten 

rankings of European cities. This is a far cry, however, from 

the world cities of London and Paris, the GDPs of which 

were US$236 billion and US$132 billion, respectively. 

12 To quote from the Vivico project brochure on the Lehrter 

Stadtquartier (p.7), the site is “the unique location 

in the heart of the city—the hub of major traffic routes. 

Here local and long distance trains converge, there are fast 

connections to the motorways and airports, and the new 

Tiergarten tunnel makes it easier to travel in by car. Even 

the river Spree features the perfect mode of transportation 

with its own special watertaxis. The Lehrter Stadtquartier 

is the capital’s central hub which is guaranteed to fulfill all 

mobility requirements.” 

13 Data in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(New_York_City) 

(accessed March 3, 2008). 

14 Key data were taken from the ESDC fact sheet. The 

fact sheet and the detailed Draft Scope of Work for the 

plan are both available at http://www.empire.state.ny.us/ 

moynihanstation/default.asp. 

180 


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