It is the onlyway to reclaim our streets as public realm space. A curious thing about traditional urbanism is that all of it's ingredients are necessary in order for it to work properly. You can adjust the mix a little, but not very much. For example, if you had grid streets, and allowed mixed uses, but had no architectural control, ugly, cheap buildings would be built and placed next to people's homes and they would destroy property values and the incentive to walk. First of all, humans tend not to like endless vistas.
People naturally prefer some sort of termination of visual vistas.
In order to make an essentially open vista feel like a place, you have to have enclosure. So the bottom line is that it is important to achieve some sort of vertical enclosure of the street space in order to make it feel like a place. Landscape architects who plant street trees in long rows do this because they know the trees will grow up to give some semblance of vertical enclosure. An ideal ratio should be established between the height of the bounding walls on either side of the street and the distance separating them, of 1 to 3. This encloses the street space much better than can be achieved with street trees.