From Railway Tracks to Ecological Corridors: The Reuse of Disused Railway Lines as Green Infrastructure for Urban and Regional Resilience

The gradual abandonment of historic railway infrastructure has generated extensive tracts of ‘residual’ land in European urban and peri-urban areas, associated with physical decay, spatial fragmentation and social marginalisation, while contemporary cities face the chronic effects of urbanisation—soil sealing, habitat fragmentation, urban heat islands and flash floods. This paper reframes disused railway lines not as industrial relics but as linear green infrastructure and strategic vectors for ecological transition and territorial resilience. Using a qualitative comparative case-study methodology, it assesses their multifunctionality along three dimensions—ecological–environmental, infrastructural–mobility and socio-economic/governance—and benchmarks three internationally recognised interventions: the High Line (New York), the Promenade Plantée (Paris) and the Vías Verdes (Spain). A structured twelve-criterion assessment—double-rated by the authors and tested for robustness across 231 weighting schemes—shows that the most visible and heavily capitalised intervention is not the strongest ecological or socially equitable performer, whereas the extensive regional network scores highest under every weighting, revealing a divergence between economic visibility and multifunctional performance. The framework is then demonstrated ex ante on a real candidate corridor, the disused FS Torre Annunziata–Cancello line in the Metropolitan City of Naples. Preserved rights-of-way thus emerge as a concrete response to the European ‘Zero Net Land Take’ objective—multifunctional linear assets of sustainable spatial planning that combine biodiversity conservation, public health and social equity, provided technical conversion is coupled with participatory governance.