ABSTRACT
The city of Lille is located in northern France, close to the border with Belgium, and lies at the centre of a densely populated, multinuclear cross-border urban region. The administrative structure of the area is rather complicated. The Municipality of Lille, with about 200,000 inhabitants, is at the core of a metropolitan area called Lille Métropole Communauté Urbaine (henceforth LMCU), the third largest in France after Paris and Lyon. Lille is the capital of the Region Nord-Pas-de-Calais, 4 million inhabitants, including two départments with a very high population density. LMCU is part of a larger cross-border conurbation, extending over the Wallonia and Flanders regions in Belgium (in some parts of the metropolitan area, Flemish is still spoken). This is the real ‘functional urban region’ of Lille, counting some 1.9 million inhabitants 1 (1.2 million in the French part and 0.7 in the Belgian part), 42 per cent of the population being younger than 25. As such, it is the most densely populated in France, and one of the youngest.
