I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about Irish villages. It was intended to make the point that it's not only possible, but utterly normal in much of the world, for some of the best walkable urbanism around to be located in smaller cities or even tiny rural towns.

In such places, the village is compact, with bustling streets and little wasted space. However, if you walk to the edge of town, you are immediately in farm fields. There is a stark line between town and country, not the suburban-style blurring of the edges we often find in car-centric North America, where the edge of town consists of a mile or two of chain restaurants and gas stations.

This post provoked some discussion on the Strong Towns Community site. In particular, one reader started a thread with the question,

I'd like more examples of rural towns with walkable urban form in USA. Are they old "railroad" towns, mostly pre-industrial/pre-auto towns; mostly mining, fishing and agrarian communities? Are some left that are not upscale tourist resorts?

The thread is worth reading; there are some interesting responses. The answers, by the way, to the poster’s questions are yes, yes, all of the above, and yes-but-not-enough. (And check out the Strong Towns Community while you're there, if you haven't had a chance to yet!)

The last sentence in particular got my attention. My sense is that, in America, we do tend to associate traditional urbanism with tourism and not with everyday life. And it's unfortunate, because it prompts a kneejerk reaction by many of our neighbors against reforms that would, for example, slow down traffic on a small town's main street in order to promote safety and a livelier street life. "That just doesn't seem realistic," people think.

The reality is that rural America does have a widespread tradition of exactly the same kind of walkable urban form you find in European villages. You can see it, usually, in at least one or two blocks of a town's main street. The materials and architecture might be more American than Irish or English or Spanish or German, but the basic form—buildings lining the street forming a continuous wall, with shops on the ground floor and apartments and offices above—is the same.

(slideshow)

The difference in America is that these places are usually in arrested development: the pattern abruptly stops when you leave Main Street and gives way to something much more automobile-oriented. The following series of photos of Brainerd, Minnesota over time, which you've definitely seen if you've attended a Strong Towns presentation, illustrates the incremental development of a small Midwestern town over generations: