Classifying Railway Station Catchment Areas. An Application of Node-Place Model to the Campania Region

In the last decades the local and regional authorities worldwide have expressed an increasing interest in the application of development strategies that combine transport and land use actions to reduces the impacts of the negative environmental and socio-economic consequences generated by the mobility needs in the urban area. Like many other regional authorities in the world, the Campania Region faces the problem to improve the existing transport network and optimize the land-use. The regional railway network consists over 3.017 km of lines and 339 stations, operated by three transport companies. The main action of the regional authority in next years is not just renewal of transport infrastructures, also to improve the land-use component in the catchment areas of the urban and peripheral nodes of transport. In order to support the policymakers and technicians, this contribute proposes a quantitative analysis of railway nodes in Campania Region in terms of transport and land-use characteristics, by drawing on the recent advances of node-place smart modelling literature. To increase the strength of our analysis, we used only open data referring to the catchment area (CA) size and analysed through an open source GIS software. Based on this systematic station inventory, we conducted a cluster analysis for all CA. In conclusion, this contribute proposes a GIS quantitative methodology of spatial analysis to support the strategic governance of regional/metropolitan railway network and the related application to the Campania Region.