3/22.- Wallonia: Louvain-la-Neuve

In the late nineteen sixties and early seventies, After the Flemish and French-speaking Universities of Leuven/Louvain split, the French-speaking Faculties decided to leave the Flemish town of Louvain and to settle in the Walloon countryside in a spot they named Louvain-la-Neuve, that is, the New Louvain. The town was built practically from scratch on a concrete slab covering a valley, the idea being to keep all traffic underneath the slab and to make the University town a totally pedestrian precinct. The urbanistic experiment turned out to be quite successful, with the University campus constituting the center of a modern town that up to the present day keeps expanding.

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