Simon Haikola

This chapter examines the rise and collapse of Sweden's national high-speed rail (HSR) vision from the mid-1990s to its political abandonment in 2022, tracing how competing interpretations of ecological modernisation shaped the project's evolution. Initially promoted by the Social Democrats as part of a state-led “Green People's Home”, HSR was framed as both an environmental solution and a nation-building endeavour. Regional actors, however, primarily viewed the first section – Ostlänken – as a tool for labour-market integration and improved domestic connectivity. Over time, these regional ambitions were fused with national aspirations for a transformative rail system linking Sweden to Europe. Yet, this hybrid vision exposed deep tensions between market-liberal and state-centric approaches to infrastructure planning. Governments alternated between ambitious rhetoric and fiscal caution, while the Transport Administration struggled to reconcile megaproject ambitions with cost-benefit models ill suited to transformative investments. As political support fragmented and right-wing populism reframed HSR as an elitist and wasteful project, national plans unravelled. Only the regional Ostlänken core survived, sustained by long-standing local demand and its more modest, pragmatic purpose. The chapter argues that unresolved ideological contradictions – rather than technical or material constraints – ultimately doomed Sweden's national HSR vision, while allowing its regional ancestor to endure.

This volume examines high-speed rail (HSR) as a globally contested and politically charged technology whose meanings and outcomes vary widely across historical and geographical contexts. While often promoted as a hallmark of modernity, environmental progress, and national integration, HSR is equally criticised as economically irrational, environmentally problematic, or serving narrow capitalist interests. The chapters collected here approach HSR through a political-economy lens, emphasising that technological change is always shaped by the intertwined forces of political institutions, economic structures, and historical inheritances, articulated through geographically variegated spatial strategies and spatial imaginaries. Through case studies spanning pioneering (Japan, France), expansive (China, Spain), stalled (Sweden, US, Canada), and emerging (Morocco, Taiwan, Fehmarn Belt, UK) contexts, the volume demonstrates how scalar and temporal tensions related to, for example, funding regimes and public-private relations, produce divergent development trajectories. Contributors analyse how modernisation discourses, neoliberal governance logics, nation-building projects, and infrastructural “residues of time” collide in decisions about if, where, and how HSR is pursued. Together, the chapters reveal HSR as a strategic lens on broader socio-spatial transformations, illustrating that its benefits, costs, and meanings are not inherent to the technology but emerge from historically specific struggles over ownership and the distribution of socio-economic gains.

High-speed rail (HSR) is the object of conflicting assessments. It is simultaneously viewed as modern, backwards, progressive, conservative, green, unsustainable, disruptive and path-dependent. This volume takes as its starting point the heterogeneous appraisal of contemporary high speed rail development and unpacks it in order to reveal the diversity of processes and relations out of which HSR projects are born. Moving beyond narrow economic investigations, the broad range of national case studies – from France to China and the US to Morocco - situate HSR planning in the wider political-economic context within which it takes place. Each chapter provides an in-depth study of a national HSR project, placed within multiscalar historical-geographic configurations. The comparative view offered by this volume challenges inherited assumptions about the development of contemporary infrastructure and shows that the analysis of HSR can provide broader insights into state-led planning and market-based governance. The book is important reading for those interested in the political economy and financialisation of infrastructure, sustainable transition, critical geography and ethnography.

1. European decarbonisation agendas such as the Green Deal missions often declare visions to mobilise regional stakeholders (European Commission, 2019). A central part of such agendas is green indu...

Two decades after the tipping points became part of climate policy discussions, this study examines how the relation between societal tipping points and climate tipping points is understood in public discourse. We analyze views on how political and social actions might impact the race between negative climate tipping points and positive societal tipping points, drawing on a global sample of 10 news outlets from 2020 to 2024. In line with previous research, our findings suggest that “Tipping point” rarely implies an irreversible, self-reinforcing process. Three discursive tensions stem from the concept's ambiguous ontology: the kind of transition envisioned, agency of actors and politics needed, and means for change. Positive tipping points offer a discursive balance, allowing discussions on negative climate tipping points without excessive pessimism. The paper ends with a reflection on whether this shift may dilute the focus on risks and promotes a depoliticized belief that incremental changes will lead to a conflict-free transition.

Trots upprepade politiska utfästelser om att transportsystemet ska bli fossilfritt har dess omställning gått trögt. Det har länge funnits en påtaglig kontrast mellan visionerna för transportsysteme ...