Abstract
I have chosen Lille, a large city located in the North of France. Lille is a symbol of the industrialization of many European cities in the 18th and 19th centuries. Indeed, Lille was an important center of textile manufacturing industry. In the 19th century, Lille was the second largest textile region in the world after Manchester. The industrialization created wealth, but it also had bad consequences for the urban landscape. In the 20th century, the textile industries began to have some difficulties because of recession, which created unemployment among the labour force. The city of Lille began to decline and became less dynamic. However, since the 1990s, local and national actors became aware of the necessity of an urban renewal in Lille and in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. Today, Lille metropolis accounts for 1,100,000 inhabitants and is located in the heart of the European economic metropolis. It is a transborder region.
