Interesting point about how geography is reshaped by the way train service may be offered and routed

The Guardian has a story, "Europe’s geography ‘kind of reshaped’ as Paris-Berlin night train returns," on the "NightJet" trains -- overnight night train service between major European cities.  The services were dropped a number of years ago and are now coming back.

They mean geography more in terms of between cities, and train versus airline travel.  But the way the train line is routed changes how people may think about geography too.

I read that article around the same time as an article about newly proposed train service in the Detroit area, which will be set up to serve Detroit Metropolitan Airport, which is in Western Wayne County, and currently doesn't have train service ("Proposed train route would connect Detroit to Toledo & Cleveland, add DTW stop," WXYZ-TV).  From the article:

The proposal would start in Pontiac and go through Royal Oak and Detroit to the airport before heading down to Toledo and east to Cleveland. It will use CN, Conrail, NS, CSX and Amtrak railroads, according to Amtrak.

By routing it this way, it uses tracks emanating from Ann Arbor to reach Toledo.  But interestingly, it won't connect to a more northerly line serving Flint, Port Huron and other Michigan cities.

To me, it's not routed "directly", the way you would think, from Flint to Toledo, providing multiple connections to existing or proposed lines.

OTOH, it may be the least expensive way to provide service to the airport.

(Also note that in the "old days" train service to Toronto was routed through Port Huron, Michigan/Sarnia, Ontario, and the new proposed routing provides different connections, without connecting Sarnia to the new route.)

At the same time, the point about reshaping geography is similar to criticisms about transit diagrams, which aren't really maps per se as they can be distorted from how things are actually laid out distance-wise, but are organized in a manner to make getting around by transit more legible and easier to understand ("London Underground Maps," Edward Tufte, "Mind the Gap: The London Underground Map and Users' Representations of Urban Space, Social Studies of Science, 2008).

Open access journal articles from Progress in Human Geography

Via email from Sage Publications:

• Listening geographies by Michael Gallagher, Anja Kanngieser and Jonathan Prior
• Forced migration and the city by Jonathan Darling
• Beyond white privilege by Anne Bonds and Joshua Inwood
• Hyper-precarious lives by Hannah Lewis, Peter Dwyer, Stuart Hodkinson and Louise Waite
• The geography of gentrification by Loretta Lees

Defining neighborhoods

L'Enfant Plan, Washington, DC.

One of the questions that came up during yesterday's H Street Alley Tour (which ended up being also an H Street history tour in part) was what is the physical definition of Capitol Hill.

Neighborhood definitions are based in large part by mobility patterns. In the era of the Walking City (1800-1890), people lived close to work, and they walked, and for the most part they lived, shopped, played, worked, and went to school in their own neighborhood.

This was about a 15 to 25 minute maximum area.

So the area around the Navy Yard, where many many people worked, where ships and armaments were constructed for more than 100 years, was its own neighborhood, as was the part closer to the U.S. Capitol, as was the H Street neighborhood, Lincoln Park, etc.

With automobile based transportation, even in the city traffic, 15 minutes takes you much further, and so Capitol Hill is expanding so to speak, amalgamating areas like Lincoln Park and the Navy Yard (Barracks Row), and now maybe H Street.

There are other reasons: real estate interests try to define neighborhoods in terms of the most inviting and successful parts of neighborhoods (it's fun to read real estate ads for places in Mount Rainier, MD or H Street NE--"be part of the arts district, the renaissance, etc.").

It occurred to me while answering the question that you could adapt some of the centre-periphery discussion from the studies of imperialism and underdevelopment from sociology and political economy. Granted that is a discussion about "first" world and "third" world nations, but I think it has some explanatory power.

Core parts of areas of the city like Brookland or Capitol Hill (Pennsylvania Ave. SE) end up becoming "centers" for larger swaths of the city, and neighborhood naming conventions change as a result too.

The trick is the neighborhood core has to want and accept and embrace this definition, or they can't capitalize on it. (I.e., compare the Brookland commercial district on 12th Street NE to Capitol Hill. There is no substantively successful neighborhood-walking based commercial district center in Ward 5.)