There’s some of this on the East coast. But settlement patterns in the US reflect the era in which it was settled. No Roman roads. No Viking villages. No mediev

There’s some of this on the East coast. But settlement patterns in the US reflect the era in which it was settled. No Roman roads. No Viking villages. No medieval Monasteries or Castles. No stately homes. The U.K. boomed in the Victorian era and is dominated by that kind of housing but the US did not boom until the post-war period so is dominated by car-centric housing. I grew up in an English village that, apart from a handful of Tudor buildings, was entirely Victorian growth. I imagine that had that growth occurred in the 1950s then it would be a very different place. Indeed by the 1990s almost all the shops had closed and we were effectively a suburb of our local town. Here in California they used to have main streets but they ripped them all out in the boom, replacing them with thoughtless concrete modernity. Then those all failed when malls were invented and if you’re lucky your city tore it out and you’ve got some fake 90s interpretation of corporate utopia as your downtown.