This is a nice overview of historic urbanism, but it nearly completely misses the real question: How will you legally be allowed to build this car-free town?

This is a nice overview of historic urbanism, but it nearly completely misses the real question: How will you legally be allowed to build this car-free town? Even in Texas you can't just build whatever you want wherever you want. Every city and most counties have minimum lot sizes, road, sewer, power, and fire code requirements that would completely defeat any effort to build a medieval european village in the US. In terms of location, you need to be 5-7 miles away from any existing city to be outside of it's ETJ. Any closer and you're probably going to be subject to the zoning laws of that city. In theory you could pull this off if you could get a critical mass in an unincorporated area and then incorporate a town so that the new town sets the development laws to allow this pattern of development, but you normally need anywhere from 200 to 2000 people to get that started, and until that time the county rules dictate. One potential hack is to build the town as a condominium complex, so the entire thing is considered one apartment/condo building, even though the design is nothing like a normal apartment/condo. Another is to treat it as a trailer park, but you probably have to do a phase of development where the buildings are small pier-and-beam structures that can pass as "not permanently attached" to the land. In short: At this point the design principles of historic and modern urbanism are generally well understood and not that interesting. The primary obstacle to these practices being brought back is that they're utterly illegal in North America, and the plausible routes around that illegality make the economics - which would already be challenging - substantially more difficult.