“Walking Madou” is a project set up very last-minute in the space of a few weeks. It is a temporary installation with broken-down cars painted yellow housing shrubs, windsocks fluttering by Madou Tower, fitness equipment in the street, planter boxes, a forest of bollards, chairs for weary feet bolted to the floor and the whole thing is yellow! The general design came form Suède 36 and experts at BLINK, designers from the info point (Mathieu Gabiot and Martin Lévêque), ATRIUM Saint-Josse, STIB and various municipal and regional services. It took only six weeks from the project being approved to its installation and inauguration. The cost was minimal compared to how radically the streetscape was changed.

For months the area was home to organised and off-the-cuff events. Rappers, skateboarders, advertisers, tourists, hen-nights all used the yellow streets of place Madou as their stage. There was open-air cinema, concerts, dancers and daily children’s football matches. Traders took back ownership of the space with terraces galore and garment rails spilling out onto the street. City life reclaimed its space for a whole year.

This project won the ]Pyblik[ prize for best use of public space in Brussels in 2014.