Pour une perspective critique et interdisciplinaire de l'écomodernisation des gares. Retour sur le colloque « La nouvelle nature des gares »

Recently, the professions involved in the design and renovation of the French railway structures, challenged by the slogan of post-carbon railway stations, circulated a theoretical and practical framework proposing an ecosystemic and metabolistic perspective for these buildings. The content and aims of this movement, which seeks to renovate and extend the field of railway ecology, were discussed at a symposium held in July 2022 at Paris Sorbonne. We explain how we reworked the analytical framework so that the papers and debates might move beyond a functionalist approach focused on the infrastructuring of nature for performance goals (mainly ecosystemic services and energy sobriety). After presenting and discussing six outstanding presentations, we select two main results that emerged from the animated debates: 1) a typological framework of articulations between railway stations and natural entities, taking account of spatio-temporal (dis)continuities or, on the contrary, of integrative relationalities; 2) a discussion on the conditions under which the railway station can be heuristically considered as a transdisciplinary object capable of linking naturalistic, technical, urban and socio-political perspectives.