Tourcoing

Tourcoing (French: [tuʁkwɛ̃] ; Dutch: Toerkonje [tuːrˈkɔɲə]; West Flemish: Terkoeje; Picard: Tourco) is a city in northern France on the Belgian border. It is designated municipally as a commune within the department of Nord. Located to the north-northeast of Lille, adjacent to Roubaix, Tourcoing is the chef-lieu of two cantons and the third largest city in the French region of Hauts-de-France ranked by population with about 99,000 inhabitants. Together with the cities of Lille, Roubaix, Villeneuve-d'Ascq and eighty-six other communes, Tourcoing is part of four-city-centred metropolitan area inhabited by more than 1.1 million people: the Métropole Européenne de Lille. To a greater extent, Tourcoing belongs to a vast conurbation formed with the Belgian cities of Mouscron, Kortrijk and Tournai, which gave birth to the first European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation in January 2008, Lille–Kortrijk–Tournai with an aggregate of just over 2 million inhabitants.