Absolutely. Back in the day before the car, even rural towns were built fairly densely, typically around a train station. They had to be, because you had to be able to walk everywhere in town, and the train was the main way to get in and out of town. Even to this day, many streetcar suburbs exist, where they had lain out a streetcar line radiating from the city center into the countryside and built mid-density along it. Many of these suburbs exist to this day, and they are often dense, walkable, transit-oriented, highly desirable, while not being anything so dense as Manhattan.

This style of development has been made literally illegal in most of North America through restrictive zoning codes, parking minimums, setback requirements, and other local regulations.

If we just made a return to traditional ways of building communities, our cities and towns and suburbs would all be vastly more human-centric than they are today.