Lille becomes a 21st-century European city

I spent several days in the Lille area in early March. I had been in the city numerous times over the years but had never previously spent a night there.

Lille occupies a peculiar place in the French urban hierarchy. The city itself, with a population in 2020 of 236,234, is not particularly big. It ranked eleventh in France in 2020. But Lille is the largest municipality in a “functional urban area” (aire d’attraction d’une ville) of more than two million if its Belgian catchment area is included; only Paris and (just barely) Lyon are larger. Even if its Belgian part is omitted, the Lille functional urban area had a population of 1,515,061 in 2020, making it the fourth largest in France; it ranked behind not only Paris and Lyon but also Marseille. However one defines it, the Lille urban area is definitely one of France’s largest.¹

It’s probably fair to say, however, that Lille’s, well, visibility does not quite match its size. Lyon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, and Marseille—and even many smaller cities like Grenoble, Nice, Cannes, and Montpellier—are surely all better known. Among the French themselves, the Nord region—and its major city—are often thought of as poverty-stricken and backward, in part because they are still associated with declining industries like coal mining and textile manufacture—and perhaps in part too because they get colder in winter than most of the rest of France. An exceptionally amusing 2008 movie, Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, satirized this feeling but certainly didn’t end it. The Lille area has suffered from its region’s reputation in a way that’s roughly comparable to the way that Midwestern cities in the United States have been branded with the problems of the Rust Belt.

In many ways, Lille’s response to its declining industrial base has resembled the response of certain American Midwestern cities, notably Chicago. Its powers-that-be decided in roughly the 1980s that its future lay in office work, convention-hosting, and tourism.

One of the results was Euralille, Lille’s singular attempt to get beyond its industrial past.² Euralille was created in part because SNCF, the French national railroad, (reluctantly) agreed to build a new TGV station in central Lille for Eurostar trains to London. It would have preferred to put a station in the suburbs but was dissuaded by the city’s strong lobbying. There was a problem, however. Fast trains couldn’t be routed through the old Gare de Flandres, a stub-end station with no easy way to provide speedy through service. The need for a new station and Lille’s interest in creating modern office buildings and a new convention center worked together to support the building of Euralille, a completely new district constructed on available land that lay near the border of the old city, not far from Lille’s central Grand’Place. Paris at this point was building La Défense, a major new office center on its western edge, and Lyon, at the southern end of the original TGV line, had created Part Dieu for comparable reasons. All these new districts were just what you’d expect of office complexes conceived between the 1960s and 1980s and built (mostly) between the 1970s and 1990s. They consisted in large part of tall buildings that lacked any kind of ornamentation. They were accessible by freeway. They came with plenty of parking. Areas for pedestrians consisted of empty concrete spaces. None of these districts as they were originally built inspired much love.

The Tour de Lille and the Tour Lilleurope, office buildings built over SNCFs Gare de Lille-Europe in Euralille. The concrete space in front of the station is for much of the day now mostly occupied by skateboarders.

But Euralille did bring offices and conventions to Lille, and, these days, thirty years later, with its concrete spaces modified to some extent and with the addition of new housing, Euralille seems to be functioning pretty well, even for pedestrians.³ A huge Westfield shopping center between the two stations was so jammed this month that, still nervous about Covid, I wondered if it was safe to go inside (hardly anyone in Lille was using a mask when I was there).

The crowded entrance to the Euralille Westfield shopping center. Note the Ilévia bike-share station.

During roughly the years that Euralille was being created, Lille, just like other cities in France (as well as numerous cities elsewhere in the Western world), was changing its planning strategy from an emphasis on catering to the automobile to a focus on supporting alternatives to the automobile. Modernity in effect was taking on a new set of meanings.

The most expensive and original manifestation of this change in emphasis in Lille was Line 1 of its Métro system, which opened in 1983. This line used locally developed “VAL” technology.⁴ It was the world’s second driverless metro line, and trains are exceptionally narrow and short. Two-car trains are standard (Line 1 used one-car “trains” until recently).⁵

One of the Lille Métro’s small-profile two-car trains stopping at one of the system’s short stations.

Also in 1983, Lille’s surviving tram line, the Mongy, was extended underground to the Gare de Flandres, and, in 1989, a second metro line was added. Lille’s rail transit system now covers a substantial part of the region (and is supplemented by French and Belgian suburban trains and buses). Here are maps.

Map emphasizing passenger rail lines and pedestrian and bicycle facilities in much of the French part of the Lille Métropole. Note that “Pedestrian facilities” and “Bicycle paths” are not always as clearly distinguished on the ground as they are on the map. The nominal scale of the map is 1:87,500. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 8.5-x-11-inch piece of paper. Most of the basic GIS data come from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap; some of these data have been modified considerably. The map is clickable, enlargeable, and downloadable.

Map of the old city of Lille and vicinity. The nominal scale is 1:20,000. See preceding map for notes.

Like many other places, Lille also began to encourage “active transportation” in the 21st century.

For example, it instituted a bike-share system, in Lille’s case run by its transit agency, Ilévia. V’Lille (as it’s now known) opened in 2011. It’s probably fair to say, however, that Lille has done less than, say, Paris or Bordeaux to make the city bikeable. Still, there are a few protected bicycle lanes, and bicycle riders in the old city of Lille are common.⁶

Sign describing the metamorphosis of the Rue Solférino, including its protected bicycle lane (shown). The goal (according to the sign) is “an even more sustainable and peaceful city.”

Lille has also done a great deal to help pedestrians, though, again, probably less, in proportion to its size, than Paris, Bordeaux, or Lyon.

It pedestrianized several streets in the central city, or at least semi-pedestrianized them, beginning in the 1990s. Its major central square, the Grand’Place, now allows one-way car traffic on a single lane, where pedestrians have priority.

Lille’s Grand’Place.

Several completely pedestrianized streets were established in more or less the same years.

Rue de Béthune, one of several fully pedestrianized streets in central Lille.

In the central city, even streets that allow car traffic now typically have wide sidewalks that are jammed with people for much of the day. Central Lille these days seems like an extraordinarily healthy place. It’s hard to imagine the run-down industrial city of forty and fifty years ago.

The Rue Faidherbe, which runs between the Grand’Place and the Gare de Flandres.

There has also been a considerable amount of pedestrianization in the Citadelle, a major city park created from Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban’s 17th-century fortifications at the northern edge of the city. There are a couple of huge parking lots in the Citadelle, but, other than these, the place is now set up exclusively for walking, running, and bicycling.

The Avenue Mathias Delobel, which runs along the southern edge of Lille’s Citadelle.

Lille’s major long-distance pedestrian (and bicycling) paths run along the Deûle, a canal that was long ago carved out of small streams. The Deûle now runs along Lille’s northern edge and connects with waterways throughout northern France and the Low Countries. There’s also a branch enclosing most of the Citadelle. It’s possible, at least in theory, to walk, run, or bicycle for hundreds of kilometers along the Deûle and connecting waterways.

The path along the Canal de la Deûle.

There are also plans to create what’s being called “Grand Euralille”: a corridor connecting the Deûle with Euralille. This corridor is now blighted by Lille’s Périphérique highway, but there are a series of parks along the corridor that could, with a great deal of work, be connected in a useful and attractive way. Grand Euralille is being touted as a 21st-century project comparable in scale to the original Euralille of thirty and more years ago.

A sign along the Deûle path describing Grand Euralille, a green corridor from the Deûle to Euralille.

There are also pedestrian facilities in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, a community dating from the 1960s and 1970s that’s said to be France’s first “new town.” Villeneuve-d’Ascq is located at the eastern end of Line 1 of the Métro. As in many of the “new towns” of the English-speaking world, pedestrians are to some extent separated from motor-vehicle traffic in Villeneuve-d’Ascq. The catch is that pedestrians have to cross roads on bridges that require climbing stairs or moving up and down steep slopes. I regret that a cold drizzle—and the absence of any sign of actual pedestrians—discouraged me from exploring Villeneuve-d’Ascq very deeply when I was there.

Pedestrian bridge in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, said to be France’s first “new town.”

The old city of Lille—the triangular (or maybe pear-shaped) ten or so square kilometers that once lay inside the city’s walls—is, like many older European cities, an excellent place for walking, running, and bicycling, even where there has been only modest recent government intervention. Most blocks in this area are quite fully built up with 19th- (or very early 20th-)century housing, which consists to a large extent of row houses of one sort or another, often containing ground-floor commerce. (There are a modest number of government buildings—and older and newer structures—mixed in.)

Rue Colbert, a more or less typical street in the old city of Lille.

Because Lille’s older quarters constitute an unusually substantial area of architecturally consistent traditional urban structures, walking around many parts of Lille is an extraordinarily pleasurable activity for someone who loves cities. It’s worth remembering that we probably owe the preservation of these quarters in part to the fact that, as late as the 1980s, few people thought it was worth replacing dilapidated older buildings in a declining industrial city—and that the building of Euralille probably reduced the pressure to redevelop central Lille until the modern era when the area came to be appreciated more or less as it was as an appropriate place for middle-class resettlement.⁷

Even if Lille hasn’t done quite as much to create alternatives to the automobile as, say, Bordeaux or Paris, it has definitely become a modern European city in the 21st-century sense of the phrase, with thriving pedestrian life, good public transit, and a healthy inner city, whose older buildings have mostly been preserved.