You can take this further. Having lived both styles you mention, plus the ultra dense, I (tongue-in-cheek) don't understand how a Dutchman's idea of "suburban f

You can take this further. Having lived both styles you mention, plus the ultra dense, I (tongue-in-cheek) don't understand how a Dutchman's idea of "suburban feel" has to means "connected houses". In a metropolis, almost everything is a few minutes walk away...and lots of it. Not a "kebab parlor" for eating, but hundreds of different restaurants (from every culture at every price point). Not a few "shopping areas" but first class shopping malls. These shopping malls aren't even _500m apart_ from each other, but directly connected. Public transport is great and cheap. This variety and, in many cases, extreme multiculturalism, exists because of dense population. If there's on downside it's likely that some of these cities appear to be poorly planned: little green space and a lot of pollution. But not all (anecdotally, the ones worth living seem to have relatively few cars, but maybe that's a correlation).