The Political Economies of High-Speed Rail (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy)

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.

Natalia Buier is a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid. She is the author of Frontiers of Appropriation: Spanish High-Speed Rail and Capitalist Environment-Making (Berghahn, 2026) and co-editor (with Susana Narotkzy and Theodora Vetta) of Agricultural Extractivism in the Mediterranean Region: A Socioecological View.

Simon Haikola is a senior associate professor at the Department of Thematic Studies – Technology and Social Change at Linköping University, Sweden. He investigates the politics of the environment with a focus on the state and how state policies are implemented across scales.