&gt; Basically America is bad because we had space for cars when they were invented?<p>I think you did an admirable job of expressing my source of dissatisfaction with the article.<p>That, and the author interjecting his personal preferences as architectural dogma - his passage about &quot;No Street Enclosure&quot; was very much of &quot;I grew up in the tight spaces of old European cities, therefore preferring the tight spaces of old European cities is a psychological default universal in humankind&quot;.<p>I actually find it amusing that he thinks &quot;parking in the rear&quot; is some sort of architectural grand achievement, rather than the historical reality: it was something that emerged from streets strewn with mud and horse shit, allowing people to emerge from carriages on a clean, usually paved, surface. It was a practical solution to a problem that doesn&#x27;t exist today.<p>Additionally, he seems to think the resultant alleys are &quot;safe&quot; (and, I don&#x27;t know, maybe they are - I really don&#x27;t know, and won&#x27;t speculate), but in every European and Euro-style city where I&#x27;ve seen such &quot;parking and garden in the back&quot;, the walls are all 10&#x27; high and topped with home-made barbed wire (usually shards of glass). It doesn&#x27;t seem like the natives believe too firmly in the safety of these sorts of hidden-from-the-public-eye spaces.<p>Beyond that, there&#x27;s plenty of false dichotomies.<p>Many of his other points are valid. They all just blend together in this general mash of &quot;American cities suck because they&#x27;re not like European cities; European cities are the epitome of human psychology and architecture.&quot;<p>Damn, Europe can be fucking beautiful. Just achingly beautiful (oh, so much of London). At other times, you can walk through street after street of 10&#x27; gates, marred only by graffiti and the occasional heavily-barred window (thinking of you here, huge swaths of Spain and Portugal). Then again, I can say the same of suburbia (see almost any part of Staten Island, New York developed pre-2000 or so if you want to see fantastic suburbs).