The Historical Interrelationship of Railways and Cities from an Urban Viewpoint.

Conceptual review and application to the Iberian Peninsula

Resumen

This paper offers a conceptual overview of the state of the art relating to the historical interre­lationships between railways and cities from the point of view of town planning, covering the good century and a half that there have been railways in the Iberian Peninsula. It addresses both urban and railway history, reconsidering major issues in this relationship. These are: 1) the tracks of lines as they cross cities and the role they play in urban life, 2) the passenger buildings of stations, seen as a focus of urban centrality, 3) the developing complexity of cities and rail­ways, together with the installation of new road and port infrastructures, and 4) the problems emerging from urban ex­pansion in the final third of the twentieth century, mostly after the restoration of democracy, specifi­cally the question of the limited permeability of rail tracks and the interpretation as a social barrier of the physical barrier thus constituted by the railway. An idea that railways are a problem grew up within this historical interrelationship.