The effects of rail network development on the reduction of spatial inequalities. Analyzing accessibility changes in the cities of Palermo and Naples

Public transport has been historically conceived to make cities more accessible to people, creating networks to effectively serve urban areas where the mobility demand is stronger and to reduce the distance between core and marginal neighborhoods. Lacking a proper planning strategy for these objectives can create additional dysfunctions within urban areas, with the result of increasing the use of private means of transport and additional forms of exclusion for large social strata. In the last decades, several cities in Europe and beyond have implemented huge action plans to improve their own mobility systems, looking at public transportation as a driver for a more just and sustainable urban development. However, because urban areas are very intricate intersections of social, economic, and environmental factors, wide knowledge gaps still exist in the way change in the mobility system can impact the social function of a city as a whole. In the context of multidisciplinary research projects such as ‘Sustainable Mobility Centre (MOST)’ and ‘Mapping the new Spatial Inequalities within Southern European Cities’, this article presents an analysis that seeks to understand how the development of the rail system in the two largest cities of Southern Italy (Palermo and Naples) can positively affect accessibility and the reduction of spatial inequalities. The work is based on a methodology that takes into consideration multiple indicators of urban development and looks at the present and evolving accessibility scenario in the two cities in order to (implicitly) suggest strategies for future policies. The preliminary results presented in this paper suggest that ongoing development plans for the rail systems are expected to have a positive impact on the overall accessibility in both cities. At the same time, if it comes to understanding the impact of infrastructure projects on the social structure of the two urban areas, evidence suggests that such increased accessibility interacts with a variety of patterns of socio-economic development.