City of Tilburg

Tilburg makes your head spin.

Tilburg – a city of funfairs and amusement, the city of the revolving house and the MIDI theatre. They like to make your head spin in Tilburg, don’t they? They certainly do. They keep at it – building, hammering, cleaning and polishing in a city that needs it, but also one that deserves it.

Tilburg is changing. The textile city of yesterday has become today’s economic beacon. It is a city full of talent and not shy about showing it off. Hard work is being done on projects which will give Tilburg a new face.

Tilburg has 200,000 residents, making it the Netherlands’ sixth largest city, and around 400,000 people live in the surrounding area. While the population of the Netherlands as a whole continues to decline, the population of Tilburg has grown by 9% in the last ten years.

But of course, size isn’t everything. What is much more important is that after losing its economic base in the 1960s, Tilburg is now growing faster than anywhere else in the Netherlands in socio-economic terms. For example, Tilburg has a relatively low unemployment rate.

Tilburg used to be known as the most important centre of the textiles industry in the Netherlands. But now those old industries have made way for more modern ones. Service provision for business has been able to expand and Tilburg has become the main logistics centre for the south of the Netherlands. Tilburg’s geographical position and excellent transport connections – both road and water – make it an excellent location for the transportation sector.

Tilburg is also a city of students, which gives the city an outstanding pool of talent for modern knowledge-intensive industries. There are over 30,000 students at Tilburg University and the various universities of applied sciences. So Tilburg can also boast a well-educated population. You can see the link between education and entrepreneurship in various areas – in sports, health care and culture, for example.

International companies such as FujiFILM, Sony, DHL, Epson, Janssen-Cilag, IFF, Otto, Fabory, Schenker, Bosch-VDT have all chosen to locate their offices in Tilburg. But the large number of small and medium-sized businesses also ensure that there is economic stability, even when things are not going so well at the global level.

Many new projects have been launched to create the space and facilities necessary for all these new residents and activities. But Tilburg is certainly not resting on its laurels. The town is much too eager to move forward for that. There is plenty of space for new development of the right kind. If you want to move on and be innovative, you sometimes need to take risks. In Tilburg, we are moving forwards at a dizzying speed, crisis or no crisis. Are you going to join us?

Website: www.tilburg.nl