THE GRENOBLE
Beautifully situated on the Drac and Isère rivers, and surrounded by mountains, GRENOBLE is a lively, thriving, modern city, home to a university of more than 35,000 students. The city's prosperity was originally founded on glove-making, but in the nineteenth century its economy persified to include mining, cement, paper mills, hydroelectric power ("white coal", as they called it) and metallurgy. Today, it is a centre of chemical and electronics industries and nuclear research, with the big, new laboratories of the Atomic Energy Commission on the banks of the Drac.

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Grenoble has also been at the forefront of social, environmental and cultural innovation, particularly during the twenty-year mayoralty of Hubert Dubedout, who was killed in a climbing accident in 1986. His Villeneuve housing project (between avenue Jean-Jaurès and cours de la Libération), though tatty and of ill repute today, started out as an idealistic attempt to provide integrated living space for a complete mix of social classes, including Arab and other immigrant workers, together with open schooling and other community-based programmes. The current mayor, previously Chirac's environment minister, has revived one of Dubedout's ideas in the construction of the city's pride and joy, its pollution-free tram network

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