Along with their many other treasures, the great cities of Europe are beloved by locals and visitors alike for their walkability, an essential part of their cultural DNA. The urban villages of places like Copenhagen, Madrid, and Oslo evolved organically over millennia to meet the basic, workaday needs and desires of residents on foot. Many American cities, by contrast, developed contemporaneously with the phenomenon of early-20th-century mass motorization. Factored into their urban plans were car-friendly standards for roads, intersections, sidewalks, and the like. So while cars indisputably changed the physical makeup of cities in both North America and Europe, the process took much longer—and proved much more difficult—across the pond, where it frequently required major re-conceptualizations and retrofits of the European urban landscape.

Now a number of Europe’s cities are deciding to move forward by going backward: to a time before their bustling, picturesque city centers were overrun with cars. As their leaders race to meet the various emissions goals of the Paris climate agreement, they’re discovering that restoring these historic spaces to their pre-automobile states is as good for tourism, local business, and overall civic contentedness as it is for air quality and a shrinking carbon footprint.

Since the 1960s, Copenhagen has served as an incubator for ideas about how best to reshape our cities along human lines, as opposed to vehicular lanes. It began by emphasizing the importance of walking and bicycling in maintaining the city’s social and environmental health. Influenced heavily by the ideas of architect and urban planner Jan Gehl, officials in the Danish capital have gradually pushed cars literally to the periphery, expanding pedestrian space and adding biking infrastructure such that Copenhagen boasts the largest pedestrian street system in the world and—as of 2016—actually contains more bikes than automobiles.

In November, Madrid announced a ban on “polluting vehicles” within a 1.8-square-mile section of its city center. The new car-free zone applies to gasoline-powered vehicles registered before 2000 and diesel-powered vehicles registered before 2006, with only a few exceptions. Similar bans on diesel vehicles are underway in Paris, Athens, and Hamburg. (Older diesel-powered cars and trucks are much more plentiful in Europe than they are in the States; the Hamburg ban, for example, applies to only two main roads, but it will restrict more than 200,000 vehicles from using them. Their drivers may want to think about buying a newer, cleaner car—or perhaps taking the U-bahn, Hamburg’s subway system.)

Now it’s Oslo’s turn. Just a few weeks ago, the Norwegian capital became the latest big European city to effectively remove cars from its urban core. In 2015, its city council approved a plan to ban automobiles altogether in the city center, an area already well served by public transit and bicycle infrastructure. When members of the local business community expressed concern (downtown Oslo has only about 1,000 full-time residents but more than 90,000 workers), the city scaled down its original plan and shifted the focus to banning private automobiles from most streets while slashing the number of parking spaces from more than 700 to just a handful—all of which are now reserved for electric vehicles or drivers with disabilities.