Small number of round (made of sticks?) huts with conical roofs, dirt paths and open spaces around them, sunny dry climate (some part of Africa?), people moving around on foot, contemporary, but relatively low-tech society.
(None of the places I’ve lived in the US or abroad have used “village” as a descriptor of our communities. My first, unprocessed sort of mental image is of a small community in a less wealthy foreign country, for reasons I could probably at least partly explain.)
A Village:
Grassed Commons
Post Office
Main Street
Diner/Cafe maybe attached to the only hotel
Oddly enough, a well or common water pump. Functional at one time/ maybe still.
Visually an eclectic mix of Midlands Britain in the early 1900s and 1950s small town America. People are kind but conscious of strangers and the dogs and kids free range throughout town, either roaming the town dump looking for treasure or behind the old blacksmith’s shop where all manner of interesting metal rusting objects are to be had.
this has been an interesting thread, but I’d like to point out something that not everyone may be aware of: a language discrepancy.
The word “village” means something different in American English than in British English (or “european” English).
There are no villages in America. There are lots of villages in England and Europe.
So to Americans, “village” implies poor peasants , or Africans living without electricity–something very foreign.
To Brits and Europeans, a village is what Americans call a “small town”, and is a familiar part of the country they live in.
It has a population of around 9000 people.
There’s a larger town somewhat nearby, and folks go there to shop for things they can’t get locally;
But mostly the villagers like to stay in their secluded isolation.
It isn’t compact, at least not for its population; it’s kind of strung out in strings and clusters, following some valleys and other terrain.
They have a village government but they don’t do much governing; they legislate things like when barking dogs are loud enough to violate quiet enjoyment and they mediate arguments between neighbors and whatnot.
Except on Long Island 
Around here, a Town is effectively a subdivision of a county. Everyone on the island lives in one of the towns unless they live in one of the three official Cities (I’m including NYC although when folks say “Long Island” they are often disincluding Queens & Brooklyn; there are two other Cities – Glen Cove and Long Beach). There’s no space between towns, just like there’s no “no man’s land” between counties.
So all the little municipalities don’t call THEMSELVES “towns”. They’re villages, or hamlets (yes, seriously), or some other quaint term.
I’d like to point out something you seem to be unaware of. Almost half of the US states formally define what a village is, and there are “villages” of different types all over the states.
Or are you implying that in no place of the US does this fact influence how people think about the word village?
and Rhode Island is formally defined as a Plantation Colony.
But in common American language, people use the word “Town”, not village.
If someone from lives in an incorporated village in New England, he will introduce himself to you as being from "a place called “Smithville, NJ, which is a small town near Atlantic City.”
Contrast this with an Englishman or Frenchman, who will say “I live in a village called X”
Village is a legal term, but not commonly used in daily conversation in the US.
There are hundreds of songs about “my old home town”.
Have you ever heard a country song where the guy sings about driving his truck to the village?.
Or a cowboy movie where John Wayne threatens the bad guy by saying “this village ain’t big enough for the two of us”.
People around here do also use “village”, though.
They are indeed very likely to say ‘I’m going into town’ when they mean ‘I’m going into the village’ (they’re already in a town, every place in New York State that’s not in a city is technically in a town even if the nearest neighbor’s a mile down the road); but that doesn’t mean the word “village” isn’t understood to mean local villages as well as far away ones. You see it all the time in the names of specific villages, as well as in saying such things as ‘it’s not the town zoning that applies here, you need to talk to the village about that’ or ‘of course the people in the town don’t pay village taxes, we don’t get village services either.’
Certainly when I responded to the poll I was thinking of villages in this area (though not of any specific one; as I was told to imagine one I assumed I was supposed to make it up.)
There may well be places in the USA where people think of “village” as ‘something that only exists far away’; but it’s certainly not universal.
Yes, I specified that none of the places I have lived in the US used that term to refer to the local communities precisely because I know there are places in the US that do. It may still be that the word is used differently in different English speaking countries as well, but it is not the case that it only refers to foreign places for all speakers of American English.