See Anthony’s session here.

See slides from his lecture here. 

High-speed rail (HSR) is transforming China by enabling new forms of urban and regional development. This presentation seeks to better understand the urban and regional impacts of major mobility infrastructure by applying three perspectives on the design of HSR in China. Corridor Mode (CM) HSR infrastructure enables fast and frequent travel by trains that connect megacities along a linear railway corridor. Monocentric-Radial Mode (MRM) HSR infrastructure integrates multiple HSR routes into a network that converge at a single political and financial hub. Multicore-Network Mode (MNM) HSR infrastructure extends connectivity to replicate the urban mobility found in metropolitan transit networks on an inter-urban scale.

Chinese experience reveals that regions served by HSR infrastructure exhibit different development patterns that can be associated with the three configurations of HSR infrastructure. While HSR infrastructure is positively correlated with economic growth in all three configurations, population growth is more varied in the areas served by infrastructure organised around the MRM and MCM configurations. This suggests that HSR commuting reduces the attraction of living in the larger Chinese cities for certain segments of the population by facilitating commuter travel to and from the central hub (MRM) and across the inter-urban region (MCM) allowing some segments of residential location and employment activity to attenuate on a scale not previously seen within a single metropolitan region.

Speaker

Anthony Perl is Professor of Urban Studies and Political Science at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His research crosses disciplinary and national boundaries to explore policy decisions made about transportation, cities and the environment. He has published in dozens of scholarly journals and via five books.

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