> It's often perceived as an architecture issue ("Europe has historical buildings […]") but very few notice that the main difference is […] the […] walkability.
I'd say both. We do have the history on show both because we have more of it, and sometimes the stuff from eras when the US as we think of it¹ existed tends to be better preserved despite the effects of WWI and WWII. But we also have it easy to get to, often safely on foot, in our cities².
> This is because they know how to scale cities to human centric proportions.
Not wishing to put us down, but I'd say a fair chunk of that is historical accident. A lot of cities started out as smaller settlements that grew and merged, meaning there is a spread of housing, shows, workplaces, etc around the whole city because it used to be in each individual part before they merged over time. America's cities on average started at, or at least very quickly gained, a larger scale, and grew from the inside out rather than by several insides growing until their outsides merged.
Some European cities made the mistake of doing away with some of that and converting to a state closer to that of US cities, and many current efforts are more about returning to their roots than being newly person friendly.
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[1] essentially from the point the founding fathers went to find somewhere they could be prescriptivist about people's, lives because they weren't getting away with that as they wanted to over here, and perhaps a little before that
[2] though there is a fair amount of it that isn't as easy to get to unless you drive
The “Founding Fathers” generally refers to the politicians who were around during the revolutionary war (starting 1775). What you are describing in your [1] seems to be more a reference to the Pilgrims and Puritians (the early North American colonists who showed up around 1620).
The Founding Fathers also did a lot of controlling of some people’s lives (in that they enslaved a lot of people), but they didn’t have to go anywhere to do that.
Anyway, if you want to walk around some history in the US, you can do that in Boston. As you mentioned, a huge factor in the walkability of a city is just having the right population density before cars were invented. The oldest European areas in the mainland US (Spanish areas, in Florida) aren’t super walkable as far as I know.
Yeah, my I had a little brain-o there and was meaning the Pilgrim Fathers not the Founding Fathers.