Regenerating small and medium sized stations in Italian inland areas by the opportunity of the cycle tourism, as territorial infrastructure

Abstract This study aims at demonstrating how cycle tourism could activate a regeneration of small and medium sized stations in inland areas, able to involve also territorial and urban areas hosting these stations. Starting point of this research is the issue of the small and medium sized Italian stations, mostly unused even if they are still active as rail service. Since control of trains’ traffic is organized only in bigger railway yards, small stations are gradually becoming empty containers: ghost stations, without any railway personnel. Thanks to the potentiality of the cycle tourism, riding slow through landscapes, it becomes possible to valorize and safeguard this heritage, not only exploiting its potentiality as shift-node between train and bike, but also imaging a systemic strategy triggering urban, territorial and social reactivation. Main challenge was to experiment how another model of mobility, the cycle tourism, able to promote a territorial project preferring to pass slowly through the inland areas, avoided by the fast infrastructural lines, could contribute in such regeneration process. In order to validate this intuition, it was carried out a project of four stations in proximity of the cycle tourist path VENTO, along the Po River. These stations were transformed in “green mobility hubs”, where shifting from train to bicycle and vice versa. This becomes the occasion to imagining new functions hosted in empty spaces of stations (both internal and external): they will provide cycle tourists with territorial info and specific services, such as repair areas and bikes and baggage safekeeping and both tourists and local inhabitants with social activities in order to bring them to live again station’s area. These functions want to generate an expectation, both in tourists and local people, to rediscover the territory around: in this way stations reassume their role of urban and territorial gates.