Bérard, Yann <br/><br/>
The Foreign as the Art of Distance. Innovation, Project Transferability, and the Size of Public Action in Urban Transportation 

 -  2009.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 7 
<br/><br/> This article seeks to comprehend the event that presents the « model of Karlsruhe » – an original means of transportation combining the train and the tramway – as a great European success in terms of urban transport. By presenting success as self-evident, the «success story» discourse tends indeed to minimise the significance of the various challenges that this innovation has to overcome, eventually asserting itself on the long run. As such, this discourse fails to take into account the numerous equipments of expertise that force the recognition of its success across borders while implying the assemblage of multiple constraints. The pragmatic perspective this article opts for invites thus to refuse a mystical conception of the foreign by substituting a genuine « art of the distance » to it, that is another way to conceive the greatness of public action and its forms of legitimization through the production of a multiplicity of collective agencies capable to connect both sites, actors and projects.