Lille

The city of Lille proper had a population of 238,246 in 2023 within its small municipal territory of 35 km2 (14 sq mi), but together with its French suburbs and exurbs the Lille metropolitan area (French part only), which extends over 1,666 km2 (643 sq mi), had a population of 1,530,624 (2023), the fourth most populated in France after Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. The city of Lille and 94 suburban French municipalities have formed since 2015 the European Metropolis of Lille, an indirectly elected metropolitan authority now in charge of wider metropolitan issues, with a population of 1,195,234 (2023).

More broadly, Lille belongs to a vast conurbation formed with the Belgian cities of Mouscron, Kortrijk, Tournai and Menin, which gave birth in January 2008 to the Eurometropolis Lille–Kortrijk–Tournai, the first European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC), which has more than 2.1 million inhabitants.