Few European cities have embraced the car as enthusiastically as Brussels. After decades of muddling through, there is at long last a policy shift towards alternative mobility and a redistribution of the public space. Yet there is still a long way to go, and with political decisiveness in short supply, the key impulse often comes from the bottom up.

You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. This was one of the slogans that emerged in the summer of 2012 during the campaigns organized by ‘Picnic The Streets’, a citizen movement that was fighting for a car-free Place de la Bourse, the beating heart of the city.