Ask Gordon Orians, Denis Dutton and/or Tony Nelessen

A good question about Chinese citiies (and it makes more sense when you look at his photos) from James Fallows:

Do I like these small streets and human-scale settings in Shanghai because I am foreign? Am I being like the French visitors who love Vietnam because it's so easy to find baguettes there? Does the Chinese version of me really appreciate the huge grandeur of the Beijing-style approach? Or do I like them because I am human -- and because something in human nature fits better with structures of a manageable size? And if this is so, what does it mean for the hundreds of millions of Chinese human beings living in these big concrete cities? (italics added)

I believe that the answer is because you are human. 

Consider the "savanna hypothesis" which suggests that humans everywhere like environments which offer "prospect" (ability to see) and "refuge" (ability to remain hidden) — landscapes such as the savanna. 

My conjecture is that such landscape preference extends to urban environments. The urban environment which best offers prospect and refuge is the traditional "main street" of tight(er) spaces. 

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The biologist who first (?) developed this savanna theory is Orians, who wrote:

Homo sapiens evolved in African savannas and only recently has invaded other continents and ecosystems. Therefore, landscape features and tree shapes that are characteristic of high quality African savannas are expected to be especially attractive to humans today. This hypothesis has been tested by determining responses of people to tree shapes and by examining the features of "aesthetic environments," that is those environments, such as parks and gardens, that are designed to make them attractive.

Dutton is a philosopher (famed as the founder of Arts & Letters Daily) who has just written The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution which suggests that:

People in very different cultures around the world gravitate toward the same general type of pictorial representation: a landscape with trees and open areas, water, human figures, and animals. 

I think we gravitate to a certain sort of urban landscape as well, though I wouldn't characterize it as filled with open space. I think the translation is more complex.

Nelessen is an architect who pioneered the use of "visual preference surveys" in urban planning and who concludes that there are enormous commonalities in what we like by way of physical environment and its metonym is Main Street. (But don't know if Nelessen, or anyone, has done any cross-cultural work with human settlements.) 

All three men would have much to say about Fallows' question.

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More later, as I ponder how to translate savanna to settlement. More links, too. And sorry about the weird formatting: I have the new improved version of TypePad.