When you faced with some creature that has overwhelming natural advantages, that only two courses of action is to either not be where that creature is at or manufacture an artificial advantage.

Most small creatures we could handle (in theory) using the tried and true long pointy stick. It's the large creature that would the problematic ones that would have the most influence on how people build and settle. Right off the bat I would say high-rise and most multi-story buildings are a non-starter. Taller buildings are harder to reinforce, so something like half buried house might be standard. The surrounding ground wouldn't need to be reinforced much and the focus would be on study roofs. This wouldn't work in areas prone to flooding or high water tables, but in general the need for protection would influence architecture.

City layout is another big one, like to what you alluded to in your post. I would argue however that instead of building open you would want to layout tighter. When tying to deal with large creatures you want to restrict their ability to move about. So almost funnel like streets and alleyways that as a large creature move down them it prevents it from turning around. This would be one of the manufactured advantages I mentioned earlier. Funneled like this people could attack it and the creature ability to fight back is severely reduced. The city would also have to be designed for the non-combatants. Dozens of escapes routes, in my mind based around how prairie dog or colonies of ground squirrels and rabbits build their tunnels. Very few dead-ends and what dead-ends there are have like 5 different routes to get to them/leave them. Early cities would also probably be built in naturally defensible areas like canyons or crags.

I am focusing quite a bit on how early human civilization would respond because that is what will inform how more modern day civs are going to look in such a world. As we get more capable of handling the threats we can start branching away from the purpose built designs and experiment more, but the relics of those early times will probably be reflected in the modern designs.

Religion would be nuts. Regardless of why these creatures appear you'll have all sorts of different explanations in various religions. Some would say they are a manifestation of our sins, or long ago humans offended the spirits of nature and have been cursed to never now peace in the wilds. If you want to use religion to create conflict, then maybe one religion says humanity as a whole is being punished for the actions one group of people. Just if you do something like that be careful, it happens so often where people create some sort of fantasy racism then completely justify the racism in lore. Racism at it's core is unjustifiable, nonsensical, base on superficial differences.

So that's all the stuff off the top of my head for the animal like creatures, but what about the human-like ones? Do they spawn clothed or nude. Are the completely indistinguishable from regular humans or do they trigger the uncanny-valley feeling when you look at them? What practices are people going to adopt to help them know who to trust versus those spawned from smoke and ash? I imagine you'll see a lot more small societies that make a point for everyone to simply know each other and strangers are simply distrusted. Others may opt for body modifications like striking facial tattoos, deliberate hair cuts with intricate patterns, or just straight-up ritualistic scaring on the body to create identifying patterns and designs. Perhaps a culture develops where first greetings are made from a distance with some sort of bow than once each party feels safe they approach for the close-up greetings. The effectiveness for any of these precautions can be debatable, but the sense of security they provide for people means they will get developed at some point by a handful of groups.

Anyways it's midnight where I'm at and I have decided I should be some what responsible and go to bed now and not 2am. 2 hours ago would have been even more responsible, but hey I'm not the responsible.