[Crawford]

Northern European cities are less dense than Southern European cities, and IMO, the street-level feel is, on a relative basis a bit lacking (though the cities certainly make up for this in other ways).

I think the two main reasons are wealth and WWII. Northern Europe has, in recent times, been significantly richer, which hastened the development of the single family home and suburb.

And WWII destroyed much of Northern Europe, which led to postwar Corbusian-style rebuilding. The wealth of the region allowed for grandiose, more autocentric schemes that were impossible under Franco in Spain or the annual Parliamentary collapses in Italy.

One result is that the Mediterannean countries have significantly denser urbanity. There's a big difference between Naples & Marseille on one hand, and Hamburg & Glasgow on the other.

France is kinda an outlier with my theory, because France was rich and stable, and is considered more Northern European, and did a ton of postwar reconstruction, but has always had less single family living and more high density development. Really all French cities have amazing density.