Urban peripheries face persistent challenges of sprawl, car dependency and spatial inequalities. Existing models as the ‘compact city’ or ‘15-minute city’, provide development strategies for urban areas but remain poorly suited to suburban contexts that lack the essential structural properties, namely network connectivity and centrality. The Evolutive Meshed Compact City (EMC2) model offers an alternative, proposing corridor-based development along existing main streets, redesigned into interconnected, multimodal, mixed-use arteries that extend the 15-minute city principles into the suburbs. This paper grounds the EMC2 model in lessons from the past through a diachronic study of Vienna’s historic linear settlements between 1800 and 2024. These historic “street villages” offer a lens into how peripheral main streets evolve as cities expand and network centrality shifts. Using a mixedmethod approach, we combine space syntax analysis, measuring shifts in network centrality, with morphogenetic analysis, tracing local morphological transformations, across thirteen suburban settlements. The study examines how linear settlements gained or lost centrality as Vienna expanded, and how these changes influenced their role as main streets. The results reveal how shifts in urban network centrality drive local morphological change and inform urban planners on designing resilient and sustainable main streets as the central elements in suburban development.