Dublin vs Lille

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Dublin (, locally ; Irish: Baile Átha Cliath [ˈbˠalʲə aːhə ˈclʲiə; ˌbʲlʲaː ˈclʲiə]) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. Situated on a bay on the east coast, at the mouth of the River Liffey, it lies within the province of Leinster. It's bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. It has a metropolitan area population of 1,173,179, while the population of the Dublin Region (formerly County Dublin) as of 2016 was 1,347,359. The population of the Greater Dublin Area was 1,904,806 per the 2016 census.There is archaeological debate regarding exactly where Dublin was established by the Gaels in or before the 7th century AD.

Later enlarged as a Viking settlement, the Kingdom of Dublin, the city became Ireland's principal settlement after the Norman invasion. The city expanded rapidly in the 17th century and was temporarily the 2nd largest city in the British Empire after the Acts of Union in 1800. After the partition of Ireland in 1922, Dublin became the capital of the Irish Free State, later renamed Ireland. Dublin is a historic and modern centre for education, the arts, management and business. As of 2018 the city was listed by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) as a global city, with a ranking of"Alpha −", which places it among the top thirty cities in the world.

Source: Wikipedia

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Lille ( LEEL; French: [lil] (listen); Dutch: Rijsel [ˈrɛisəl]; Picard: Lile; West Flemish: Rysel) is a city at the northern part of France, in French Flanders. On the Deûle River, near France's border with Belgium, it is the capital of the Hauts-de-France region, the prefecture of the Nord department, and the main city of the Métropole Européenne de Lille. As of 2017, Lille had a population of 232,787 within its administrative limits, and Lille is the first city of the Métropole Européenne de Lille with a population of 1,146,320, making it the fourth-largest urban area in France after Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. More broadly, it belongs to a vast conurbation formed with the Belgian cities of Mouscron, Kortrijk, Tournai and Menin, which gave birth in January 2008 to the Eurometropole Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai, the first European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC), which has more than 2.1 million inhabitants. Nicknamed in France the "Capital of Flanders", Lille and its surroundings belong to the historical region of Romance Flanders, a former territory of the county of Flanders that is not part of the linguistic area of West Flanders. A garrison town (as evidenced by its Citadel), Lille has had an eventful history from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution. Very often besieged during its history, it belonged successively to the Kingdom of France, the Burgundian State, the Holy Roman Empire of Germany and the Spanish Netherlands before being definitively attached to the France of Louis XIV following the War of Spanish Succession along with the entire territory making up the historic province of French Flanders. Lille was still under siege in 1792 during the Franco-Austrian War, in 1914 and 1940.

It was severely tested by the two world wars of the 20th century during which it was occupied and suffered destruction. A merchant city since its origins and a manufacturing city since the 16th century, the industrial revolution made it a great industrial capital, mainly around the textile and mechanical industries. Their decline, from the 1960s onwards, led to a long period of crisis and it was not until the 1990s that the conversion to the tertiary sector and the rehabilitation of the disaster-stricken districts gave the city a different face. Today, the historic center, Old Lille, is characterized by its 17th century red brick town houses, its paved pedestrian streets and its central Grand'Place. The belfry is one of the 23 belfries in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Somme regions that were classified as UNESCO World Heritage Sites in July 2005. The construction of the new Euralille business district in 1988 (now the third largest in France) and the arrival of the TGV and then the Eurostar in 1994 put Lille at the heart of the major European capitals. The development of its international airport, annual events such as the Braderie de Lille in early september (attracting three million visitors), the development of a student and university center (with more than 110,000 students, the 3rd largest in France behind Paris and Lyon), its ranking as City of Art and History since in 2004 and the events of Lille 2004 (European Capital of Culture) and Lille 3000 are the main symbols of this revival. In 2020, the European metropolis of Lille will be "world capital of design".

Source: Wikipedia