[reeredfdfdf]

There's a middle-ground between a big city and full countryside.

I lived my childhood in a place with about 4000 people in it. School, friends and everything else I needed was within walking, or at least biking distance. My parents didn't have to drive me everywhere. Obviously there weren't as many possible hobbies and events as in big cities, but mobility wasn't an issue.

[wongarsu]

Smaller cities with about 40k-200k inhabitants can also be a nice sweet spot: big enough to have a decent number of events and hobby opportunities, small enough that you have low-traffic sidestreets within walking distance of the city center, and nature is still very much in reach

Assuming a European city layout where a city center exists and the 200k inhabitants aren't all spread out into suburban sprawl. Suburbia quickly kills the idea of walking and biking distances

[Cthulhu_]

I live in suburbia in a sprawling European city of 200K inhabitants, and design can fix a lot of that. The neighbourhoods are designed like little towns themselves, each having stores, schools, day cares, sports / leisure activities, restaurants and other businesses of their own, as well as playgrounds and nature areas which are often used by local youths to build shelters and play in.

The old city center - museums, historical buildings, big library, cinema, theater etc - is a longer trek, but still doable in ~20 minutes cycling. Plus there's trains and buses.

TL;DR, suburban doesn't mean it should kill things being in reasonable distances. However, big caveat, it's all kind of built in a compact way; garden space is often limited (total ground is usually 2x the house itself, so 50m2 ground floor space + 50m2 garden), roads are narrow (but this is good because it's bike / pedestrian optimized, cars can't go fast), etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinex-location for a superficial description, or look at a map of Dutch suburbs or houses (https://www.funda.nl/) to see what it's like.

[rayiner]

Right. Most people in "rural" places live in small towns. My wife went to high school in a rural Iowa town with 2,000 people. You can walk from the high school to anywhere in town in 30 minutes.

[hombre_fatal]

All the rural towns I've been to in Texas are just farm roads that you'd never want to walk down and towns with no real centers/plazas to hang out at (and you'd have to drive there anyways).

Then I moved to Mexico and they were on to something there: small towns have central plazas that are heavily used for social activities, young men and women can walk around meeting each other, and they build densely enough to where you can walk around the town.

So I envy anyone whose rural US upbringing is like your wife's. I didn't think we had that as an option anywhere in the US except for movies.

[ghc]

Most small towns in New England are laid out like those towns in Mexico. I wonder if it's a question of age? The pressure to create town squares must have been a lot higher before the automobile came around.

[kelipso]

I think in the western US, the government gave people parcels of land but the land may have been far away from population centers.

[pavel_lishin]

Samesies. It wasn't until my friend group in rural Texas got enough licenses that we could actually drive somewhere to hang out that spending time together outside of school became plausible.

[resoluteteeth]

A lot of older small towns are good but newer stuff tends to be built along highways with no other connecting roads, and more spread out

Also, a lot of the "rural" population in census data is actually living in outer suburbs and newer suburbs tend to be pretty unsafe for kids to walk/bike around

[qweiopqweiop]

Likewise. All my friends were within cycling distance and we had nature to play in. Personally I can't imagine growing up in a city like London.