Times change, the historic home was left behind and a new one had to be built from scratch, yet the spirit of intellectual audacity has remained the same. Students and teachers, butchers and bakers, shopkeepers and repairmen and everyone it takes to run the cafes, restaurants, theatres, cinemas have learned to live together without the cohesion of custom or tradition. Attempts to create Utopia have failed in practise more often than they have succeeded. But Woitrin and Lemaire, together with the architects and townplanners they consulted, came up with a plan that was both practical and visionary. Utopia made to order Creating a town without cars means that pedestrians have a perpetual right of way.
Parking is confined to three floors of underground garages and a few open-air lots.
A train station connecting Louvain la-Neuve with Brussels and the rest of the country is located underground, just below the central square. Because the shortest distance between two points may not always be the most pleasant, the streets have been allowed to meander at will. One of the early urban proposals, promptly rejected, was for an American-style grid pattern of streets, geometrically logical but boring to live with. For such a small town, first-time visitors may sometimes find it exasperatingly easy to get lost in. Being a carless community there is no real need for pavements, but the planners have provided covered walkways or arcades that are architecturally attractive as well as useful when it rains or, rather less often, when there's too much sun.