> And then there are third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable and you again don't need a car.

Ah yeah sure I'll just find work in a place and then buy a house there. It's not like 3+ decades of mismanagement on migration and internal policies left even places 30+ minutes by car from work unafforable by mere mortals.

> third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable

Very many people, including me, want to live in a glorious walkable bijou old-town stone apartment, except they can't afford to because they stopped building them like that in about 1756 and the only jobs within walking distance of the old town are in hospitality and those do not pay the salaries to buy one of the treasured old town apartments from under an AirBnB host.

And if it's a really small, non-tourist town in the middle of nowhere, it may not even have the hospitality sector. So, yes, that bijou property may indeed only cost 50,000 euros, and yes, you can walk to the boulangerie or the confitería or whatever but you're probably going to need a car to get out of your tiny town and go to work or basically anywhere else.

It's interesting to me seeing the different ways that different people respond to our modern urban hellholes. I don't want to live in a city at all, I want to live in at most a village where people all have their own land, and the village 'center' is just the most convenient nexus of property lines, where people could set up the local market.

I always sort of assume people who are into de-urbanization are also de-dev, because I don't see how or why the large-scale industrial base would be needed or could be sustained with only smaller, distributed cities, but it's interesting to hear another perspective.

You only have everything you need for work in such a city if your "work" is limited to small offices, restaurants, and retail shops. So you're excluding everything related to manufacturing, agriculture, resource extraction, logistics, military, etc. You know, all of that stuff that keeps modern industrial civilization operating and allows quaint medieval towns to continue existing at all. If you like where you live that's great, but it's hardly ideal and certainly not scalable.