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During the Riss glaciation, the Isère glacier divided into two parts at the outlet of the Cluse de Voreppe, one of which spilled over the Seuil de Rives (the Rives sill) and covered the Bièvre plain, while the other descended the current course of the Isère, probably up to St-Marcellin.

During the following glacial period (Würm), the glacier stopped, towards the south, at the Poliénas/St-Gervais narrowing, and towards the west at the highest point of the Seuil de Rives. As the glacier retreated it left a complex series of moraines.

Today this broad landscape can be considered the western extremity of the Grenoble metropolitan area, touching its airport.

The Rives sill is a sort of isthmus linking the Piedmont of Chartreuse occidentale with the hills and the Chambarans Plateau , creating a passage between the plains of the Bièvre and the Isère. The site is indeed the passageway par excellence between the Dauphiné foreland and the Alpine mountains, standing just before the monumental gateway of the Cluse de Voreppe . All the roads from the Rhône Valley converge towards the sill, with the single exception of A 49, which runs along the Isère and directly joins the Cluse. This has resulted in a local tradition strongly marked by commerce and industry.

The traditional industrial establishments in paper-making, weaving and silk-making have spread over the Morge Valley (hit in 1897 by catastrophic flooding) between Voiron and Moirans and the Fure Valley between Rives and Fures. In addition to these age-old activities is the liqueur-making tradition of the caves of the Grande Chartreuse, Génépi and Antésite, along with many other businesses like Rossignol, the sporting goods manufacturer. But there has been uncontrolled industrial growth along the Fure, and smaller businesses are now developing around Rives . As for Voiron , it is growing denser, pushing its industrial area northwards, along the N75, between the Bois de Bavonne and Martillière, where growing pressure on real estate needs to be controlled.

The coteaux at Coublevie, Saint-Jean-de-Moirans and Voiron, which enjoy bright sun at midday, offer magnificent views of the Alps . Nevertheless, the mountains are distant, shrunk to simple reminders of the summits and ranges, and are felt more than actually contemplated. As for the foregrounds, between the three urban centres of Rives, Voiron and Moirans, these are covered by by a layer of construction whose only pattern is the occasional island of orchards or groves, relics of former times.

This urban growth, which extends from the western extremity of the Grenoble area to its airport, is an example of the suburbanisation that marked the initial growth phase of the big Isére cities during the post-war boom, pushing the existing suburbs outwards. These drew inspiration mainly from the English garden city model. but all that was kept from the existing suburbs was the idea of the garden, in the form of private gardens and green spaces. What resulted was "an undefined development of suburban layers composed of single-family dwellings surrounded by green space" (Berque) . Within these layers, the dwelling is composed of autonomous forms that claimed to be in direct contact with nature, whereas in actuality they merely promote the artificialisation of the environment. Maps and photographs give an unflattering picture, and a trip through them does not arouse the interest of a real city's streets and squares.

Following the garden city phase, a second phase in the spread of suburbanisation took off from the "modern movement" in urbanism and architecture, rooted in particular in the Athens Charter drawn up by Le Corbusier a half century ago. This was based on functionalist ideology and had the result of conceiving the city in specialised zones linked by traffic arteries that were themselves specialised between "habitation units", along the model of what was built in Marseilles: "this building is isolated (end to building continuity); it is situated set off from and at an angle to the street (end to the alignment of façades, end of the street); levels are multiplied arbitrarily without regard to the height of neighbouring buildings (end to the harmony of heights, end to city roofs, end to the co-ordinated modulation of street façades based on levels); etc." (Berque).

Eventually the limits of the garden city and the functionalist urbanism models gave rise to a certain alienation from the city, for economic, environmental and cultural reasons. The rise in transportation time, the excessive cost of property ownership, pollution levels, the monotonous ambience, and environmental damage (drainage culverts, embankment constructions, the grading or levelling of hills and valleys, the drainage of wet environments, the deforestation of hillsides, etc) were just some of the reasons for this. This provoked a reversal of the movement from the countryside to the city in 1975 and led to a movement from the city to the countryside, in search of new modes of urban integration. This saw the rise of rurbanisation, which extended the limits of periurbanisation to distances of 30 to 40 kilometres beyond the urban centres. One example of this is found in developments in the continuation of the Rives sill in the plateau de Dolomieu and de Pont-de-Beauvoisin .