I’m really into traditional architecture and pre-automobile urban planning. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of that in North America. I know there are a few, I was wondering if Ontario specifically has any nice villages that fit this description? Preferably not abandoned ones, i am looking for ones still inhabited.
Yes, but at the same time, they were designed for horse/cart or horse/buggy - which meant that they were easy-ish to convert over to automobile roads. The stretch from Front St. to Queen St. in downtown Toronto sees a lot of traffic by car, but was laid out well before cars. A lot of places along the Seaway (except for the lost villages area) have a history of being pre-car. The difference was with the abundance of space, large farming lots were set up and made for a very grid-like arrangement of roads. And the road allowance was fairly generous: 66 ft or 1 chain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concession_road
A lot of the “small cities” have a few blocks of “traditional” rural urbanism left intact, but it quickly devolves back to walmart parking lots and gas stations. Off the top of my head, Stratford, St. Marys, Lucan, and Strathroy all have very nice main streets. The closer you get to the 401 corridor the worse things get generally. Honestly, any of those could be quite nice to live in if the inter-city rail service was a bit better and there were grocery stores in the walkable areas.
Think the old streetcar and railroad suburbs are probably the closest to that, but they’re insanely expensive and are being “modernized” with car centric elements as we speak.
Quite a few in Niagara but in most cases “nice” is rather debatable, and the “nice” areas don’t usually overlap with the pre-automobile streets you’ll find typically in the downtown areas, but you can still see evidence of the stuff that used to be there dating back to 1812 and beyond, if you know what you’re looking for. A few still preserved highlights are Niagara-On-The-Lake and downtown Thorold. Other cities like St. Catharines, Chippawa, Fort Erie, Welland have some historical bits too but they’re pretty few and far between as most of the area was financially completely decimated by the death of manufacturing in the northern US and Canada, and there were few resources to protect or maintain anything at that time. Most of it was left to ruin, and ruin it did.