A big part of why college towns work so nicely is economic circumstances of the student body. Simply put most students aren’t bringing a car to campus and by definition now need to live somewhere closer to get to class. And on top of that the town is a monocrop where maybe the couple tens of thousands of kids are the vast majority of the population.

This is why it can’t really play out as nicely everywhere. You might work across town from your partner vs merely across campus, or in another town. Your location is compromised by definition and not benefiting from economies of scale like it was when it was at least compromised with another 40k people in your demographic with a similar commute and life pattern within 2 square miles. And you don’t have to pay a couple thousand a year for parking privileges either so you might be taking the car on trips that would have been a forced walk in college for lack of car.

The disneyland point is a bit tired and worn imo among internet urbanists and doesn’t even make sense in practice if you’ve ever been to disneyland. Main street isnt the draw. It is this strip of shops you are obligated to walk through as you enter the park to try and tempt you from your dollar. You can’t even hang out there; all the shops are packed with people looking at merchandise, all the restaurants on main are like coffee and ice cream “please leave and keep walking” places, and during fireworks display it is a miracle and a testament to the staffing that there isn’t a crowd crush from people leaving through the bottleneck as well as people staying to see fireworks framed with the castle. In these situations they actually open up a staff only alley to the public that is parallel to main street to relieve some of this bottleneck.

This seems like a strangely theoretical argument, as if the world outside America simply does not exist.