All the old residential buildings in some of the nicer cities I've visited are also cookie cutter boxes. Residential areas in the older parts of Amsterdam are i

All the old residential buildings in some of the nicer cities I've visited are also cookie cutter boxes. Residential areas in the older parts of Amsterdam are indeed beautiful and pleasant, but, much like the another commenter suggested, I'm pretty sure that's almost entirely due to the rest of the environment, especially the transportation infrastructure. Sure, they're nice well-built 300 year old buildings, but I think that, if the city were more car-centric, nobody would spend as much time outside, so nobody would be as motivated to take care of the exteriors of their buildings. And then it would look a lot more like the dingy dirty grimy pile of bricks that you see in cities like Chicago that use similar (if newer) architecture but haven't made the space between the buildings nearly as hospitable to humans.