Schuman Square in Brussels’ EU quarter has been left as a concrete expanse with little greenery or shade after the planned canopy was never built. The redevelopment was meant to turn a traffic-clogged roundabout into “an urban agora”, but it now stands as a neat little monument to how the Brussels apparatus can spend years talking about Europe while delivering a slab of unfinished concrete.
The square sits over an underground car tunnel, railway and metro station, and a maze of gas and water pipelines, which made the project difficult from the start. It also had to be designed around the security needs of the surrounding EU institutions and the square’s use as a venue for frequent demonstrations. That detail matters. This is not just urban planning. It is a public space built inside the security perimeter of the European Council building, the “space egg”, where EU leaders gather behind their own architecture of control.
Pascal Smet, a former Brussels minister for mobility who launched the project in 2015, said he was “disappointed, angry and sad” about the result. “Schuman Square is the carte de visite [the calling card] of Brussels. It is the symbol of Europe,” he said from a cafe on the square. “This should be a meeting place for people.” Francis De Wolf, the engineer-architect, said: “The project is not finished. It is very difficult for me to understand what has happened behind the scenes in politics.”
A Square Built for the EU, Not for People
The original pitch was grand enough. An international competition selected a Belgian-Danish consortium of architects to redesign the space. The canopy was supposed to be the crowning glory. Planners imagined EU officials and local people lunching and chatting under its shelter, with tourists flocking to the landmark and taking selfies in its mirrored reflection. The green roof was meant to contrast with the surrounding glass and steel EU buildings and offer respite from the sun, especially after the record-breaking heatwave that hit Belgium in June. It was also meant to shelter people from Brussels weather, where it rains about 200 days a year.
Work began in 2023, six years after the winning design had been chosen. By then, costs had spiralled because of high Europe-wide inflation stoked by the Covid pandemic and the Ukraine war, city officials said. The budget was announced as €25m in 2023, with €17.4m from EU Covid recovery funds. So much for the tidy language of recovery. The money came, the promises came, and the canopy didn’t.
Deadlock, Delay and the Electoral Circus
Brussels’ political crisis then deepened the problem. Power in Belgium is very decentralised, and regional governments, including Brussels, have wide-ranging controls over public works, most transport and urban planning. Brussels is a bilingual city with 14 parties in its 89-seat parliament. After Brussels elections in June 2024 produced no clear result, parties were deadlocked over a new government for the city of 1.2 million people. Big construction projects were put on hold and investments were frozen.
A coalition led by a Francophone liberal minister-president finally emerged this year after a record-breaking 613 days of negotiations. In the meantime, the caretaker government could not authorise new funds to pay for the higher costs of the canopy, but it also faced a deadline to complete the works in order not to lose EU funds. François Deschamps, a spokesperson for the Brussels minister for mobility and public works, Elke Van den Brandt, who has held the post since 2019, said: “So we were in quite a conundrum, because we did not have the right to put the money into the canopy.”
That’s the machinery in plain view: elections, deadlock, caretaker rule, deadlines, and the constant threat of losing money from above if the local administration doesn’t move fast enough. The people below get a square that still isn’t finished.
The caretaker government appealed to the EU for a top-up in June 2025. Belgium’s prime minister, Bart De Wever, rejected the plea and denounced Brussels as “a failed state”. De Wever, described as a fiscal conservative on a mission to bring Belgium’s federal finances under control, argued that “begging” numerous European institutions for help was a national embarrassment. The language is brutal, but the arrangement is familiar: a city trapped between its own fragmented institutions and the EU’s funding leash.
Taking office in February 2026, the new Brussels government cancelled the canopy after its costs had risen to €13m from €5m, Deschamps said. The Brussels council of ministers decided, he said, “we could do something greener, something cheaper, and something that still fulfils the goal, which is to bring shade and refreshment”. Brussels is now in talks with architects to develop “something as green as possible within the building limitations of the square”, possibly with water features, Deschamps added. The city hopes the square will be finished by the summer of 2028, with details on the plans promised by the end of the year.
Who Gets to Call It Europe
Smet continues to argue for the canopy, while more than 2,100 people have signed a petition launched by the Brussels branch of his Flemish socialist party calling for its construction. He said: “If you can imagine something better, that allows demonstrations, [deals with] security issues, is green, is iconic, is symbolic for European unity … if the alternative is better, I will not say no.”
That sentence does a lot of work. It folds demonstrations, security, symbolism and “European unity” into one polished package, the kind Brussels loves to sell to itself. But the square remains unfinished, the canopy is gone, and the EU quarter still sits on top of tunnels, pipelines, and the security perimeter of a political machine that can’t even finish its own calling card without a crisis.