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Transforming spatial governance High-speed rail planning and the regional integration of Hume
Australian governments and private consortiums have been planning high-speed rail since the 1980s by studying different corridor options and railway technologies to connect major cities along the eastern seaboard. Despite the introduction of government policies to promote land use and transport integration, recent proposals for intercity high-speed rail have obtained weak connectivity between station infrastructure and regional settlement systems. In Australia, justification for weak connectivity is typically based on a combination of transport planning and urban design considerations that are said to hinder integration between regional stations and established urban areas. However, recent studies of high-speed rail development overseas suggest that the problem instead has its origins in national systems of multilevel governance. This research takes the Hume Region in northeast Victoria as an illuminative case study to understand the influence of high-speed rail planning on regional governance in Australia between 2008 and 2017. A spatial governance perspective is used to explore the in-between spaces of state planning that embed infrastructure projects into regions to promote their economic and political integration. The conceptual framework draws on Raco’s (2005) understanding of regional integration as a political process that reconfigures power relations and gives rise to hybrid institutional forms. A mix of research methods, including geographic analyses of three high-speed rail proposals and qualitative analyses of interviews with national and regional actors (n=64), government policies and media reports, showed that high-speed rail planning is connected to processes of regional integration by its potential to restructure settlement systems and embed new institutional and political structures into non-metropolitan regions. The research found that regional institutions in Hume coevolved with the institutional structures that governed high-speed rail planning in Australia. This convergence between national and regional-level structures can be explained by the top-down nature of infrastructure planning and regional policy. However, the analysis identified ground-up moments of institutional reform that indicate greater reflexivity between territorial levels than is typically acknowledged in the domestic planning literature. In the case of high-speed rail planning in Hume, institutional reforms were instigated by localised struggles against the partisan structures that govern public investment in critical infrastructure. It remains to be seen if newly empowered regional actors highlighted in the research can secure broad-based outcomes from high-speed rail development because they lack the planning authority and fiscal resources needed to implement integrated planning solutions. In Australia, the forms of regional integration engendered by high-speed rail planning have limited potential to promote sustainable development outcomes in non-metropolitan regions because the strategic goals of the state and powerful non-state actors are privileged over the planning goals and development needs of regional communities. Consequently, high-speed rail planning is transforming spatial governance by reproducing national corporatist structures in non-metropolitan regions. These structures, however, do not engender a regionally integrated approach to spatial planning.
