Why is City Life so Important?

I love nature, wilderness and green growing things, but I am really a "city person" - and if you ask me why, the reason always comes back to some version of "cities are, or should be, a great place to live."

What makes a city a great place to live? It might be hard to define, but you know it when you walk it... wide sidewalks flanking charming shop windows, plenty of places to stop for a quick bite or something to drink, unusual specialty businesses, chance encounters with people you know. It's not density alone - there are plenty of places that are dense but not walkable or especially charming. It's not being close enough to walk to things - in many cases walks are short but so unsafe or uninspiring that people just don't walk there.

I would say it comes down to whether the place has "City Life" - is it the sort of place where many things are going on, where you can walk around and just discover things, where there are "third places" to meet people outside of home and work. This kind of place is highly correlated with the Strong Towns ideal of a place that puts people and their lives above traffic throughput or automotive convenience.

Infill "missing middle" housing provides enough density to support transit and a wide variety of local businesses, and ending overly restrictive zoning allows those businesses to locate close to their customers. That in turn allows many people to arrive by walking, cycling or transit, which in turn obviates the need for space-wasting parking minimums. The whole package functions together, just as it did in US cities before the advent of the auto age.