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Since the mid-19th century, European cities evolved around the railway station as a central pivot where goods and people converge. This is still true today when railway stations take on a new role as urban hubs in the European high-speed train network. Lille in northern France, which has two stations from different railway periods—Lille-Flandres and LilleEurope, is a good example illustrating this quasi-continuous past and present urban ambitions. Lille is a city of 170,000 adjacent to the French-Belgian border. It is at the economic heart of the Lille-Roubaix-TourcoingVilleneuve d'Ascq conurbation of 1.2 million people, ranking (excepting Paris) third after Marseille and Lyon in terms of population. It played such a major role for centuries in the commercial and industrial development of the region— originally coal, textiles, sugar and agriculture, that it was linked by railway to Ghent and Antwerp in Belgium in 1842, before it was linked to Paris (only 220 km away) in 1846. At that time, Lille was still surrounded by its 17th-century Vauban fortified city wall, so the station—actually a simple platform— was built outside the city. From then on, the inconvenient location of Lille Station was debated periodically between the City Council, the Northern Railway Company established in 1845 by the Rothschild family, the French government and some of Lille's most prominent citizens. These controversies also stimulated nearby urban projects.
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