Historical Context: From Textile Looms to Server Rooms

Lille's commercial DNA runs deep. For centuries, this was where Flemish merchants met French traders, where textile fortunes were made, and where the Industrial Revolution transformed northern France. The grand bourgeois houses of Vieux-Lille, built on textile wealth, now host startup offices and venture capital firms—a fitting continuity.

The city's decline in the 1970s and 1980s was brutal. Factory closures left entire neighborhoods unemployed. Young people fled south. By 1990, Lille symbolized France's deindustrialization crisis. Yet within this crisis lay opportunity.

"We had to reinvent or die," recalls Pierre Mauroy, Lille's longtime mayor who orchestrated its transformation. "The Channel Tunnel was coming, high-speed rail was planned. We could become a crossroads again—not for goods, but for digital business."

The establishment of Euralille business district in the 1990s, designed by Rem Koolhaas, signaled ambition. But the real transformation came with the digital revolution. Lille's merchants had always understood cross-border trade. E-commerce simply digitized what they'd done for centuries.