A region between tradition and redeployment

France’s leading textile region, second most important agricultural region, a privileged area for the car industry and mail order companies... After a painful period of industrial restructuring, Nord-Pas-de-Calais is experiencing a significant revival of its economy.

In the 1980’s, the final abandonment of coal mining opened a difficult period for a region considered, since the time of Louis-Philippe, to be "the most important factory in France". Twenty years later, its redeployment is not yet complete, but Nord-Pas-de-Calais has already come an impressively long way, by making the most of its principal asset - its location.

Looking over the busiest strait in the world, the region is part of a European megapolis which runs from southeast England to the Rhine. It is, with 75 million inhabitants, the highest concentration of people on the planet. Midway between three capital cities, Paris, London and Brussels, all linked by HST (High-Speed Train), it is a short distance from the Netherlands and Germany. It is outstandingly well served by some nine motorways, a vast network of canals and railways, and a brand new international airport (Lille-Lesquin).

Such accessibility to other regions has not escaped the notice of foreign capital, which, for some years now, has invested massively in the region. A great many businesses, especially food and farm-produce companies, have located here: Coca-Cola, McCain, Nutrasweet, Häagen-Dazs...

At the crossroads of Europe

As well as its excellent road infrastructure, which enables them to export throughout Europe, these companies benefit from the raw materials of France’s second largest agricultural region, specialising in chicory and endives, cereals and above all potatoes (foremost producer nationally). On the coast, the region can also pride itself on having France’s third largest freight handling port (Dunkirk), the leading port for travellers to mainland Europe (Calais), and France’s biggest fishing port (Boulogne-sur-Mer), which is also the leader in the processing of maritime products.

Illust: Euralille, the busines, 17.8 kb, 210x203
Euralille, the business and cultural centre which also houses the regional capital’s station.

While traditional industrial investment has plummeted in the rest of France, textiles and the iron and steel industry, the other two pillars of the industrial past of Nord-Pas-de-Calais together with coal, continue to play an important role in the local economy. The region has retained its first position in the clothing textiles sector by maintaining a network of small firms. They are in a position to respond rapidly to demand, particularly from the national leaders in mail order sales, based not far away, in the area around Roubaix-Tourcoing, such as La Redoute and Les Trois Suisses. After modernisation, a 65% reduction in its labour force and concentration of the factories near the ports, the northern iron and steel industry, imitating Usinor Sacilor and Sollac, has also once more become the French number one.

Since the 1970s, the area has also witnessed the rising strength of the car industry. Numerous sub-contracting firms have gravitated to the area around the Renault PSA Peugeot Citroën car plants, such as La Française de Mécanique, Firestone and Valeo. The Japanese Toyota group has also recently set up its first car factory in mainland Europe in Onnaing, near Valenciennes. Not far from there, there is a concentration of large rail construction companies. They produced the shuttles which run through the Channel Tunnel, and perfected the driverless subway train, the VAL (Light Automatic Vehicle). After the official opening of the first branch line in Lille in 1983, the VAL has since been selected not only by Toulouse, Rennes and Orly, but also by Taipei (Taiwan), Chicago and Jacksonville (United States).

The Lille subway system is exported

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The driverless Lille metro.

The tertiary and services sector have at last achieved considerable volume, especially in Lille, now third most important in finance, and second for French insurance after Paris. But it is tourism above all which, in recent years, has grown spectacularly. It has even become the second largest economic activity, just behind textiles, but ahead of agriculture, transport and the car. It is mass, local tourism, primarily involving the people of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, even if one third of them are foreigners (British, Germans, Belgians and Dutch). They come to sample the joys of the coast, the beauty spots, leisure facilities developed on former industrial sites and the countless popular events.

Nord-Pas-de-Calais is also a region through which 16 million travellers pass, attracted primarily by the sunshine of the South. To avoid becoming nothing more than a region of passage, Nord-Pas-de-Calais has provided itself with tertiary sector and tourist facilities able to attract new investors while improving the living environment. Euralille, for example, is a new district in the regional capital. Covering 70 hectares, it includes a station, an exhibition, conference and theatre complex, a shopping centre and two tower blocks of offices and flats. It is designed to accommodate international companies wishing to benefit from a strategic position at the centre of the London, Amsterdam, Paris, Cologne quadrilateral, with the advantages of these major capitals, but without the costs.

Emmanuel Thévenon
Journalist
The Channel Tunnel

In order to cross the channel without getting one’s feet wet, three tunnels, with a total length of 150 kilometres, have been bored through the rock 40 m beneath the sea, between Calais and Dover. Since 1994, 330 trains carrying freight, passengers, heavy goods vehicles and cars pass through the tunnel every day, making London two hours from Lille by the Eurostar HST.


Key figures

•Area: 12 414 km2
•Population (1999): 3,996,588
•Density: 322 inhabitants/km2 (three times the national average)
•Main cities (1999):
Lille: 980,503 inhabitants
Lens: 319,626 inhabitants
Valenciennes: 336,951 inhabitants
Béthune: 259,198 inhabitants

•Economically active population per sector:
Agriculture: 3.3%
Industry: 31.3%
Tertiary: 65.4%

•Regional GDP (1996) = 443.6 billion francs (67.6 billion euros).
•Principal trading partners (1994):
Imports: Benelux, Germany, Italy, Great Britain.
Exports: Benelux, Germany, Great Britain, Italy.
The driverless Lille metro.
Euralille, the business and cultural centre which also houses the regional capital’s station.


The first Euroregion

Since the region is firmly oriented towards Europe, its inhabitants tend to ignore frontiers. The frontier with Belgium is so unnatural that you simply have to cross the street to change country! The residents of Lille take the plane in Brussels rather than Paris, the Flemish come to do their shopping in the Nord region and the English buy second homes in the Pas-de-Calais... It was thus perfectly natural that in 1991 Nord-Pas-de-Calais was behind the creation of the first Euroregion, with its neighbours in Kent, Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels-capital.

It has also benefited considerably from the regional policies financed by European Structural Funds. Amongst hundreds of completed projects, these financial aids have in particular permitted the rehabilitation of industrial wasteland, transport services to the Lille business centre, training for more than 55,000 people, the creation and enlargement of Nausicaà, and even the setting up, in Seclin, in the mining basin, of one of the most modern waste sorting centres in the country.