Nice metropolitan area (French: aire urbaine) as defined by INSEE is a residential area near Nice. It has 933,020 inhabitants and an area that covers a large strip of territory from the city of Villefranche-sur-Mer to the westernmost part of the Alpes-Maritimes département, including cities like Antibes, Grasse, Cannes and Cagnes-sur-Mer.
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History
In the beginning of the nineteenth century, Nice was a 20,000 inhabitants city belonging to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. It grew steadily to reach 48,273 inhabitants in 1861, one year after annexation to the French Second Empire. By the end of the century, the population was over 100,000.
The urbanized area began to spread outside city limits, in La Trinité to the North, Villefranche-sur-Mer to the East and Cagnes-sur-Mer to the West. In the meantime, old cities, about 30 km to the West, like Grasse, Cannes, Antibes were experiencing regular growth as well.
After World War II, growth increased with the development of mass tourism and development of transports in the region. The consequences of the end of the Algerian War were also very important for the region's population, with many Pied-Noirs settling in the area. The growth in main cities decreased, while new town were growing very quickly like Saint-Laurent-du-Var, Vallauris, Le Cannet.
In the 1990 census, INSEE identified two distinct aire urbaines in the département : Nice, with 539,217 inhabitants, and Cannes-Grasse-Antibes with 352,000 inhabitants.
Only nine years later, with the 1999 census, the two aires merged to form French sixth aire urbaine.
The table below shows the evolution of the seven most important communes parts of nowadays aire urbaine of Nice (census data).
Geography
The aire urbaine consists in a narrow strip of land along the sea: 50 km (31 mi) long and between 5 and 15 km (3.1 and 9.3 mi) wide.
Transportation is based on a railway line and vital A8 autoroute, built from 1966. Nice Côte d'Azur Airport is the second biggest in France with more than 9 million passengers welcomed every year.
Organisation
This statistic-based metropolitan area is divided into multiple administrative divisions. Among them are :