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Old Posted Jan 8, 2015, 3:43 PM
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mousquet mousquet is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: Greater Paris, France
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France's urban areas: projects & developments

Since I've been a little tired of that traditional, political and economically ineffective Paris is the center of everything fact in France, I think a thread like this may be interesting while regionalism is slowly but gradually growing in the national institutions and culture.

To start off, these are the 50 largest urban areas in France, as defined by INSEE, so you guys can roughly grasp what this will be about even though iy's hardly readable.

Rank (by population) | Urban area | Density (2010) (km²/sq mi) | Population (2011)

1 | Paris | 712 / 1844 | 12,292,895
2 | Lyon | 360 / 932 | 2,188,759
3 | Marseille-Aix-en-Provence | 541 / 1401 | 1,720,941
4 | Toulouse | 228 / 591 | 1,250,251
5 | Lille (French side of the border to Belgium) | 1253 / 3245 | 1,159,547
6 | Bordeaux | 201 / 521 | 1,140,668
7 | Nice | 387 / 1002 | 1,003,947
8 | Nantes | 264 / 684 | 884,275
9 | Strasbourg (French side of the border to Germany) | 346 / 896 | 764,013
10 | Rennes | 178 / 461 | 679,866
11 | Grenoble | 255 / 660 | 675,122
12 | Rouen | 276 / 715 | 655,013
13 | Toulon | 508 / 1316 | 606,987
14 | Montpellier | 328 / 850 | 561,326
15 | Douai-Lens | 801 / 2075 | 542,946
16 | Avignon | 246 / 637 | 515,123
17 | Saint-Étienne | 301 / 780 | 508,548
18 | Tours | 150 / 388 | 480,378
19 | Clermont-Ferrand | 191 / 495 | 467,178
20 | Nancy | 184 / 477 | 434,565
21 | Orléans | 135 / 350 | 421,047
22 | Caen | 220 / 570 | 401,208
23 | Angers | 169 / 438 | 400,428
24 | Metz | 242 / 627 | 389,529
25 | Dijon | 112 / 290 | 375,841
26 | Valenciennes (French side of the border to Belgium) | 574 / 1487 | 367,998
27 | Béthune | 415 / 1075 | 367,924
28 | Le Mans | 169 / 438 | 343,175
29 | Pointe-à-Pitre - Les Abymes | 281 / 728 | 316,599
30 | Reims | 132 / 342 | 315,480
31 | Brest | 315 / 816 | 314,239
32 | Perpignan | 308 / 798 | 305,546
33 | Amiens | 138 / 357 | 293,646
34 | Le Havre | 431 / 1116 | 291,579
35 | Genève-Annemasse (French side of the border to Switzerland) | 237 / 614 | 284,525
36 | Bayonne (French side of the border to Spain) | 225 / 583 | 283,571
37 | Limoges | 122 / 316 | 282,876
38 | Mulhouse | 553 / 1432 | 282,714
39 | Dunkerque | 328 / 850 | 257,887
40 | Nîmes | 324 / 839 | 256,205
41 | Poitiers | 109 / 282 | 254,051
42 | Besançon | 129 / 334 | 245,178
43 | Pau | 162 / 420 | 240,898
44 | Annecy | 283 / 733 | 219,470
45 | Chambéry | 266 / 689 | 216,528
46 | Lorient | 271 / 702 | 214,066
47 | Saint-Nazaire | 242 / 627 | 211,675
48 | La Rochelle | 202 / 523 | 205,822
49 | Saint-Denis (Réunion island) | 686 / 1777 | 197,883
50 | Troyes | 93 / 241 | 190,179

The Paris urban area is not even the most dense since it has sprawled so much. Two of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, the northernmost of the country neighboring Belgium are more dense, especially Lille whose average density leaves me in a wow.

Lyon, Marseille and Bordeaux have their own threads on here. This thread could widely focus on French cities whose population figures are less than a million, as my purpose here is to talk about what's happening in cities of minor importance on the global or even continental stages, still major to the national scale. Of course, Toulouse, Lille and Nice may be mentioned here as long as they don't have any thread. Oh well, just feel free to post anything related to any French city including Paris here if you will, this thread will just be convenient for me to bring some news about cities ranked from 4 to 50 from time to time, except for those very few with their own threads on the site.

Besides, I'm doing it for France cause it's obviously by far what I know the most about, so it's easier for me to post about that in particular. But then it'd be great if something similar was done for every Euro country in this subforum, at least when it's relevant like for France itself.
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