Brussels has changed: the Grand Place once an open-air car park, Place Flagey tarmacked over, the Senne river buried beneath concrete... What remains of the capital as it once was?
Welcome to a postcard from the past: the Grand-Place reduced to a vast parking lot, Flagey a never-ending roundabout, the Senne buried like a poorly kept secret under layers of concrete. For decades, Brussels went full throttle ahead towards car-centric modernity, covering streets, squares and rivers in tons of asphalt. Today, the scene is very different. Pedestrians have taken over the city, and bicycles have replaced bumpers... But what did Brussels look like before the first jackhammer struck?
Mobility in the Centre
In the 1960s, the streets of central Brussels were overrun by cars. Imagine the majestic Grand-Place reduced to a giant car park, and the boulevards in the centre clogged with trucks and cars. Those were the days of car-centred urban planning, where individual mobility took precedence over public space.
Back then, the pedestrian area resembled a motorway, with polluted, unbreathable air and the constant noise of trucks, cars and horns. It was impossible to get a full view of the Grand-Place, which was so overrun by coaches, buses, cars and trucks. It wasn't until 1991, when the contours of the pedestrian zone were laid out, that the Grand-Place in Brussels became visible again.
Today, the city is undergoing a metamorphosis. Bold initiatives are being taken to rehabilitate public spaces and bring together cars, two-wheelers, pedestrians and public transport. These are changes that have radically transformed the urban landscape of Brussels and its mobility.
Multimodal Brussels
Since 2015, the city centre has been able to breathe a little more, redesigned around pedestrian traffic. On almost 50,000 m² between Fontainas and De Brouckère, the cars have been moved aside. Literally.
The figures speak for themselves: between 2012 and 2022, the proportion of trips made on foot rose from 32% to 36%. Cycling, for its part, has made a spectacular leap. Brussels now has more than 300 km of cycle paths, used every day by tens of thousands of cyclists. What's more, according to Statbel, more than half of Brussels households do not own a car.
The public transport company STIB is following the trend: 70 lines, more than 1,300 vehicles, and more than a million passengers transported every weekday. Even the car parks are getting in on the act. Interparking is adapting its offer: less surface parking, more underground or shared solutions.
Car parks everywhere
While the boulevards in the Centre used to be real urban motorways and the Grand-Place an open-air car park, other places that are now emblematic of life in Brussels have undergone a transformation in recent decades.
Take Place Flagey in the early 2000s: a gigantic tarmac area, not very welcoming and often flooded. It was a place where people rushed to do their shopping and didn't hang around. Since its renovation, the square has become a neighbourhood hub, with benches, plane trees and a thriving local life. The same is true of Place Jourdan in Etterbeek, long dominated by parking logic. The friteries are no longer surrounded by bumper cars, but rather by conversations and strollers.
Other car parks are disappearing entirely. Such is the case with Parking 58, which was demolished in 2018 to make way for Brucity, the town's administrative centre. A symbolic way of turning the page on car-centred urban planning. And who still remembers that the Parvis de Saint-Gilles once was a massive car park? Now, bistro chairs have replaced scorching bonnets, and the weekend market smells more of coriander than diesel.
In the footsteps of the Senne
Let’s not forget that Brussels hasn’t always been built solely on cobblestones. All you have to do is dig a little, sometimes literally. Let's go back 150 years: at the time, Brussels had nothing to envy from Bruges, with the Senne canal running through it from north to south. The idea of a little Venice may sound like a dream to us today, but in the 19th century it was more of a nightmare for the people of Brussels. As an open sewer, the Senne stank and spread many diseases.
To combat this unsanitary situation, Mayor Anspach decided to vault the Senne in 1867. The bed of the Senne then underwent a gigantic construction project to become the Place De Brouckère and the Boulevard Anspach. In recent years, however, Brussels has been rediscovering this “ghost” river. In the Parc Maximilien, a section of the Senne was reopened in 2022.
Scenes from the past
Some stories don't show up in the stats. Think of the little concrete kiosk on Place Louise, just outside the metro station: a newspaper vendor, some plastic ads... On Avenue de la Toison d'Or, people queued for cinema tickets at the Capitole or the Acropolis, between two shoe shops. On the pavement of Place de Brouckère, people used to eat a cone of fries while watching the trams go round and round while cyclists didn't dare overtake the buses.
In short, Brussels has changed, but Brussels hasn't forgotten. While not everything is perfect (the roadworks, the tensions around traffic, the adaptations still to be made, etc.), the Belgian capital has managed to chart its own course and rethink its way of life, and it's still going strong.