Our New England adventure ended a few days ago, but it left an impression. It was a rare road trip with my sister, scoring high for that reason alone. And then there was the scenery.

I’m deep into research for my thesis, thinking a lot about place and places, why we feel the way we do about a physical location. The trip reminded me that suburban sprawl is not everywhere. Pockets of the country are not paved and pureed. They are compact and walkable with narrow lanes, old houses and a palpable sense of the past.

Patterns of settlement matter. Protecting those patterns matters, too. Families built the homes, churches, villages and town squares of New England, and their modern-day descendants make sure they remain in some form. Beauty is the result, and beauty is not insignificant.

In his essay “The Beauty of Belonging,” the late British philosopher Roger Scruton says that what most inspires visitors to Venice are not the grand canals and cathedrals but the “ordinary doorways on the backwater canals, the marble-lipped bridges across them, the shrines and niches that punctuate the walls, the sense all about you of a meticulous but effortless aesthetic order, in which all the residents have willingly collaborated over centuries.”

Most American cities do not have this order, Scruton says. Americans are good neighbors, but its “sense of community stops short of taking collective decisions as to how the neighborhood should be constructed so as to belong to them all.”

Beauty matters, Scruton argues. And after spending a few days in New England, I know what he means.

(Groton, Massachusetts, viewed from Gibbet Hill.)