It, and indirectly the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium, still owns the land, which it rents on long leases to homeowners, shopkeepers and companies. The town is largely the inspiration of Michel Woitrin, the former general administrator of Louvain. He had studied both at Cambridge University and at Harvard, and he knew from the start that what he wanted to create a balanced mixture of town and gown not a ''ghetto campus.'' Even before the division of Louvain university, when the idea of setting up a French-speaking institution seemed far from most people's minds, Mr. Woitrin took his ideas secretly to the Los Angeles architect Victor Gruen. In city planning, as in his plan for Fort Worth Texas, his technique is to ring the center with freeways and garages, and allow no cars within. Mr. Woitrin was also influenced by a professor of history at Louvain, Raymond Lemaire, who in long walks through the forests, spoke of the ideal cities of the Renaissance philosophers and artists, places with a human and spiritual as well as a material dimension.
Cars are mostly out of sight underground, or in lots at the edge of the town.
To build the ideal city, there had of course to be inhabitants. The planners have mingled students residences and family homes along winding, tree-lined pedestrian alleys. Mr. Woitrin was also determined to avoid reinforced concrete, which he says quickly looks gray and dirty in Belgium's usually somber climate. The predominant material is red-brick, but architects have also been given free rein to use other materials such as wood, slate and stone. A student survey published a couple of years ago showed that most liked the relatively intimate pedestrian character of the city and the availability of inexpensive housing for students, but a majority thought the architecture was too monotonous.