You could make an equally scary video about the dangers of NIMBYism, which has essentially become an official part of the urban planning process in many cities. From bike lanes in Brooklyn to desperately needed housing in D.C., public micromanagement has become such a problem that several cities are now trying to rein in the Not-In-My-Backyard crowd. “The current process does not work for anyone,” one urban design expert told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We want the Planning Commission to focus on big planning issues, not micro-design issues.”

How tiny bands of refuseniks and wealthy obstructionists absorbed so much power provides instructive lessons for how they might be stopped. “The field [of urban planning] went through a major change in the last half-century,” says Rob Goodspeed, a PhD candidate at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “There was a time in the ’50s when people thought it would be more of a science. We’d use expert analysis and computer models to tell us the answers.”

This approach, of course, was a disaster. Cities traumatized by the post-war urban renewal projects that arose from such thinking granted broad development-veto power to private citizens. San Francisco got its onerous “discretionary review” process in 1955 as its urban-renewal czar M. Justin Herman was brutally leveling large swaths of the city — a process that today is used by residents to oppose everything from broadband Internet infrastructure to a neighbor’s backyard deck because it could “lead to the use of a grill.” Boston created its “citizen advisory committees” in the ’60s, whose members, plucked from neighborhood groups, remain empowered to approve or deny development proposals to this day. And in 1970, the California Environmental Quality Act gave anyone in that state the power to stymie development by questioning its eco-friendliness, a right that’s routinely abused.

These rules, designed to check the power of city officials, now perversely consolidate immense power in the hands of a few outspoken “concerned citizens.” By dragging out the building process indefinitely, these people can make it so expensive that deep-pocketed luxury developers have a better chance of surviving it than anyone actually building affordable housing. Worst of all, these rules have created a new norm in which individual residents just assume that their personal opinions should carry great weight in routine planning decisions. According to a 2011 survey, one in five Americans have actively opposed a local development project, and 74 percent want no new development in their communities at all.

On the one hand, it’s nice that so many people think their neighborhood is perfect just the way it is. On the other, this feeling may be a quirk of psychology, not an accurate reflection of reality.

Oxford University researcher Toby Ord co-authored a 2006 paper titled “The Reversal Test: Eliminating Status Quo Bias in Applied Ethics” that helps explain anti-development activism. Status quo bias is an irrational desire for things to stay exactly as they are, even when change would be beneficial. It springs from a variety of factors, from risk aversion to fear of the unknown.

Ord’s research showed several reasons why preferring the status quo is often flawed thinking. For instance, wanting zero change assumes that your neighborhood is at its optimum state at that exact moment. Had you moved in 10 years earlier, however, you would have felt it was then in its perfect state, and the development that arrived over the next decade — the development you now think is perfect — would have bothered you. “When something is already a part of someone’s location or environment, they tend to adapt to it much more easily,” says Ord.

People also tend to overestimate transitional costs — the potentially unpleasant period during which the change is taking place. In urban development, this might mean noisy construction or visual disarray. “It is easy to overstate such transitional burdens,” Ord’s analysis found, comparing it to America’s reluctance to switch to the metric system. “The cost would be one-off, while the benefits of enhancement would be permanent.”

But what Ord calls “the argument from risk” — not knowing exactly what a proposed development’s impacts might be — is perhaps most integral to NIMBY thinking, and it’s the tactic that’s often used in their arguments. David Ropeik, a Harvard instructor and the author of “How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts,” says, “If you’re looking for issues that will appeal to most people, fear is high on the list.” It’s why political ads often speculate about what horrible things the other candidate might do if elected, rather than focus on his or her record. “Politicians use fear to get elected, companies use fear to sell products… It resonates more than something intellectual.”

Economists call this tendency to let emotions cloud our assessment of risk “prospect theory,” which holds that investors feel the sting of losing money more intensely than they feel the pleasure of gaining it. This is why people hold on to falling stocks for too long instead of unloading them — it’s painful to take the loss. In urban development, it’s why some people cling to their neighborhood’s current state — say, car-oriented versus getting a new rail line — even if that current state is deteriorating.

But Ord argues that this is shortsighted because if a proposed development’s impact is unclear, it’s crucial to take into account not just its unforeseen negative effects, but its unforeseen positive ones, too. “Uncertainty about the goodness of the consequences also means that the results may be much better than anybody expected,” writes Ord. “The potential for unexpected gains should not be dismissed as a far-fetched theoretical possibility.”

A perfect example of this is old transit systems. When New York constructed its rail lines over 100 years ago, their purpose was to move people around and spur growth uptown. What the city didn’t foresee was that, a few decades later, this system would also be key in alleviating surface congestion once car ownership soared. And certainly no one could have predicted that, decades after that, giving millions of people an alternative to cars would help mitigate something called climate change. Many projects will hold future value that goes beyond the perks spelled out in the current brochures.

Understanding the NIMBY mindset this way could help planners work around their concerns. “Since Alexis de Tocqueville there’s been a healthy skepticism of big top-down schemes in the United States,” says Goodspeed, who thinks that planners do need to listen to all opponents of large developments, even the NIMBYs. “Sometimes that means stepping back, holding more meetings, spending more time on studies — all of that is the cost of weighing these changes.”

But in the end, says Goodspeed, “‘Should the subway happen or not?’ is not the right question. The question is, if it disrupts their lives and is dangerous for them, how can we mitigate that?” That may mean taking some veto power away from residents, and a few cities are starting to move in that direction. San Francisco has been struggling to reform its discretionary review process to make it less prone to abuse. And at Northeastern University in Boston, new software that could bring the public review process online could both increase transparency and broaden public input beyond just the anti-development gadflies who have time to go to years of public hearings.

For now, though, endless public hearings, lawsuits, and stalling tactics disguised as environmental reviews continue to shape the urban landscape. Last week, Metro officials conceded to yet another public hearing with the Beverly Hills subway opponents — and were told at that hearing: Proceed as planned and we’ll sue you. “We believe there [are] alternatives that have not been fully explored yet,” the president of the city’s school board told the Los Angeles Times.

The subway’s completion date is currently 2036. Might want to push that back a year or two.

Or in this case, his son’s. The — neighborhood? development? — was built by Ross Perot Jr. as an “urban lifestyle destination.” But what it really is is an entertainment district: that swath of cityscape whose character has been preordained by a city council vote and is now identified by brightly colored banners affixed to lampposts. (The entertainment district’s close cousin, the arts district, is often lurking somewhere nearby.)

What could be wrong with a district where nightclubs and galleries are encouraged to thrive? Nothing, necessarily; done right, a city can help foster these scenes with a gentle guiding hand. Constructing an entire milieu from whole cloth, however, is where cities get into trouble. “The problem with these created-overnight districts is that you’re trying to create a culture as opposed to letting one grow,” says Nathaniel Hood, a Minneapolis-based transportation planner. “You’re getting the culture that one developer or city council member thinks the city needs, as opposed to the ground-up culture that comes from multiple players.”

Victory Park is an extreme example, hyper-planned right down to the performances to be held at its American Airlines Center. (“A U2 concert is fabulous,” Perot told the Wall Street Journal. “KISS, not so good.”) But the Dallas Arts District, though less micro-managed, has struggled with its identity as well. Conceived in the 1970s by design consultants in faraway Boston, it relocated the city’s arts institutions to the northeast corner of downtown. Another planning consultancy drew the boundaries of the district, and one by one, the city’s cultural icons were moved there. Today, it contains the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Winspear Opera House. It’s home to buildings by Renzo Piano, I.M. Pei, Rem Koolhaas and Norman Foster. In fact, you’ll find everything in the Dallas Arts District except a lot of people, says Patrick Kennedy, owner of the Space Between Design Studio and the blog Walkable DFW.

“A district inherently becomes a single-use idea,” says Kennedy. “Everything has to be ‘art.’ You end up with a bunch of performing arts spaces and when they’re not in use it becomes a vacuum.” This vacuum has made the district itself a museum of sorts, something impressive to observe but strangely inert. (The Chicago Tribune called the area “the dullest arts district money can buy.”) It has few apartment buildings; one is the new Museum Tower, a 42-story condo residence that, as of last month, had sold only 16 of its 102 units. The Museum Tower recently made news when its glass facade began reflecting 103-degree sunlight directly into the Nasher Sculpture Center next door. Now the tower’s developers and the Sculpture Center are embroiled in a fight over which party should alter its building — essentially, arguing over whether art or residents should reign supreme in the Dallas Arts District.

That’s a defeatist choice to have to make, but the monocultures created by urban districting make it almost inevitable. At last week’s 20th annual Congress for the New Urbanism, Hood spoke about the folly that is Kansas City’s Power & Light District, an $850 million entertainment district whose neon signage is as blinding as its eagerness to be hip. But no one would mistake Power & Light for a neighborhood created by cool kids. “Land costs are higher downtown, so you have to create something genuinely unique,” says Hood. “It can’t just be an outdoor mall with slightly cooler bars.”

But that’s exactly what you get in the Power & Light District: themed venues catering to neatly delineated tastes, Epcot-style: the Maker’s Mark Bourbon House & Lounge (“Southern Hospitality rises to a new level”), the Dubliner (“true Irish ambiance”), Howl at the Moon (“a completely unique dueling piano entertainment concept”) and PBR Big Sky (“every cowboy and cowgirl’s nighttime oasis”). The model suggests that city life is nothing more than a selection of personal consumption experiences. But at times, the district feels more like a very enthusiastic ghost town — one with a $12.8 million budget shortfall.

It’s not just that the developers are boring people — the economics of single-owner districts incentivize blandness. Chain stores and restaurants can afford to pay higher rent, so they get first dibs. To boost rents even higher, tenants are sometimes promised that no competition will be allowed nearby. “Starbucks will be willing to pay the higher rent if [the developer doesn't] let other cafes into the area,” says Hood. And forget about occupying the Power & Light District — you’re on private property. For a full list of the rules (no bicycles, panhandling, profanity on clothing) you can consult its website.

“A true [arts or entertainment] district is always sort of moving around,” says Kennedy. “It’s wherever the bohemians find cheap real estate.” For instance, compare Power & Light or Victory Park or even the Dallas Arts District with Boston’s Kenmore Square, which developed in the ’80s and ’90s as a wildly diverse barrage of punk venues, rock clubs, dive bars, sports bars and beloved hole-in-the-wall restaurants, all anchored by Fenway Park, bringing together an unlikely cross-section of Bostonians into one spontaneous not-an-entertainment-district for freaks, foodies and sports nuts alike. And despite being unplanned and unsubsidized (or, more accurately, because of that), Kenmore eventually upscaled in exactly the way city leaders hope for.

Kenmore Square, by the way, also disproves the conventional wisdom that the presence of a stadium or arena automatically dooms neighborhoods. “Fenway Park is a beautiful example of a large entertainment-type building sitting in a neighborhood that’s very vital,” says Dean Almy, director of the Dallas Urban Laboratory, “and one of the things that makes it vital is that it isn’t all about Fenway Park.”

But mainly, it shows that these districts work better without all the bureaucratic attachment parenting. A great example is Cincinnati, where, rather than busting in with relocation plans and a branding scheme, the city has designated five neighborhoods Community Entertainment Districts where aspiring restaurateurs can simply get a liquor license directly from the state for about $1,500, rather than on the open market where they cost up to $30,000.

Milwaukee has taken a similarly hands-off approach to Water Street, an area on the city’s waterfront where a fairly raucous bar scene emerges nightly. Daniel Campo, assistant professor of architecture and planning at Morgan State University, co-authored a study of the Water Street scene and identified several factors that make it work: Small, older buildings (cheap enough to open a dive bar in), flexible facades (no historic designations), open late (naturally) and located on a slightly dicey fringe of town where chaos can unfold.

Campo characterizes such spaces as areas of “benign neglect,” neighborhoods where  entertainment zones can naturally emerge. “These are places where no one lives, the cops don’t go there, people don’t care about that area.” He compares it to New York in the ’70s and ’80s, when the police had bigger fish to fry than kids drinking beer on the street. “You have to be comfortable with the way these places work. There’s going to be loud people, messes on the sidewalk — it’s not for everyone.” They’re an example of what philosopher Michel Foucault called heterotopias: “Neither utopian or dystopian, but a paradoxical combination of both.”

Water Street is an example of how, when the city declines to step in, citizens will. In a less cacophonous way, Cleveland has done this with its Gordon Square Arts District, where a group of nonprofits got together and created their own urban district where theaters already existed. “You had three very humble nonprofit organizations, no powerful boards, that just needed capital improvements,” says the District’s executive director Joy Roller. Their early efforts got $2 million to encourage arts in the area and established Cleveland as a “thought leader” in arts-district development.

What these areas of Cincinnati, Milwaukee and Cleveland have in common is (and I hate to even utter this often meaningless phrase) urban authenticity. It’s a notion that gets tossed around a lot, but here it truly applies — people know when they’re being handed an experience that was created by committee for purely economic purposes. Planned districts are about “applying a label and hoping your city lives up to it,” says Kennedy. Instead, cities should “foster a natural emergence of character. You never know what’s going to pop up.”

It’s a surprising demographic shift that has some in the Rust Belt wondering if these cities should trumpet their gritty, hardscrabble personas, rather than try to pretend that they’re just like Chicago or Brooklyn, N.Y., but cheaper. Detroit has certainly proven that a city’s hard knocks can be marketed, from “ruin porn” coffee table books to award-winning Chrysler ads to “Detroit Hustles Harder” hoodies. Could other Midwestern cities go all-in on their own up-by-your-bootstraps appeal? “I think there’s a backlash in the American psyche that’s longing for that,” says Cleveland native Richey Piiparinen. “Look at Miami. We’ve learned that all that glitters isn’t gold.”

Piiparinen recently referenced this trend as “Rust Belt chic” in a post on the blog Rust Wire, describing its allure as “the warmth of the faded, and the edge in old iron and steel … part old-world, working culture, like the simple pleasures associated with bagged lunchmeat and beaten boots in the corner. And then there is grit, one of the main genes in the DNA of American coolness.”

Demand for decay could spell a new era for post-industrial cities — or run its course as a faddish blip that attracted more media coverage than actual converts. Piiparinen believes the shift could last, as more and more people find themselves not just priced out, but burnt out by increasingly tidy, boutiquey cities like New York and Seattle. “The country in the 2000s, it became about growth, glamour, living beyond your means,” he says. “It was all aspiration. Now we’re comparing the foreclosed glass condo tower to the old brick building that’s stood for a hundred years.”

But Rust Belt chic is at least partly a romantic fantasy, and that makes it a risky way to try to revitalize. Last year, Guernica magazine ran a withering critique of what it called “Detroitism,” the fetish for crumbling urban landscapes mixed with eccentric utopian delusions, “where bohemians from expensive coastal cities can have the $100 house and community garden of their dreams.” What these dreams seldom include, however, are the almost unimaginable systemic problems many of these cities suffer from: failed schools, violent crime, the threat of municipal bankruptcy. Photographers parachuting in to shoot Michigan Central Station and Anthony Bourdain’s gushing endorsement may be clouding the fact that cities in crisis won’t be lifted by chicness alone.

What struggling cities need are jobs, and not just jobs at coffee roasteries in abandoned railroad terminals that make for great style-section articles. “The only way [a turnaround] will really happen is by reintroducing meaningful, equitably compensated work into these cities,” says Catherine Tumber, author of “Small, Gritty and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World.” “This longing can be expressed aesthetically, but it can only be satisfied by restoring the workforce.”

That kind of pragmatic attitude defines Jim Cossler’s approach. The CEO of the Youngstown Business Incubator in Youngstown, Ohio, Cossler wants one distinctly non-gritty thing for his city: software companies. “We don’t want to take any other company,” he says, because software firms are cheap to start up, their location is irrelevant, and they either succeed or fail quickly.

Sexy, it ain’t. But the approach is simple and efficient: YBI uses LinkedIn to find young people who grew up in Youngstown but then moved away and now work in the computing field. “Then we make this pitch to them,” says Cossler. “We pitch them the fantastic software industry growing here in Youngstown, and the prospect of moving back to where their parents and grandparents are, and oh, by the way, have you seen our real estate prices?” So far they’re communicating with 1,800 of what he calls the “Youngstown diaspora,” and 187 of those — who now work everywhere from Austin to Tokyo to Tel Aviv — have asked to meet with him. But Cossler doesn’t believe that anyone who didn’t grow up in Youngstown will ever move there. “We’re making the case that they could run a software company for a fraction of the cost of Chicago, and their kids can see their grandparents more than once a year.”

Of course, Youngstown, population 60,000 and falling, is no Cleveland. And certainly, whatever tactics will work should be employed, be they gritty aestheticism or unsexy pragmatism. But it does point to a conflict: A lot of people love glassy condo towers. They may not want their city to be shabby. There could be potential Rust Belt returnees who disagree with Piiparinen’s opinion that Cleveland’s ossifying railroad bridges are the city’s “best pieces of public art.” Marketing a city as rough-hewn and rusty could attract a certain type of resident, but inadvertently repel another.

“I think there’s a certain schizophrenia going on in these cities,” says Tumber. “The local boosters and government leaders are pushing to rebrand themselves as part of the creative class. But then there are people who recognize that Akron will never be New York, who want to use the assets they do have to create a different kind of urban identity.”

There are ways the two can work in tandem. Tumber points to movements like New Environmentalism, part of which is the idea that repurposing old construction makes these cities a greener choice than, say, San Francisco. And there are many High Line-esque acts of readaptation that everyone can agree on — the Economist recently reported on a dying Cleveland mall that turned itself into an indoor garden.

If Rust Belt cities did find themselves in the position of having both decay and upscale development — if industrial loft apartments started selling in the millions and Cleveland became as well branded as Brooklyn — many residents might consider that a good dilemma to have. “This whole process of using the beauty and aesthetics of decay to revitalize, it’s a paradox you can never get out of,” says Piiparinen. “We’re competing with other cities to attract eyes and talent, and so we’re going to use our grit, our authentic landscapes, our coolness. Just don’t cheese it up. Don’t get cute. This Rust Belt chic, it could be a way toward something good.”

“Whole Foods will move into neighborhoods that, at first glance you think, why are they moving there?” says Bill Reid, a principal at the Portland, Ore., land-use consultancy Johnson Reid. “But they’re confident in their numbers.”

The company is so good at the real-estate game that it has spawned a catchphrase, the Whole Foods Effect, a phenomenon Detroit is clearly banking on — the developer of the site is receiving $4.2 million to build there. That figure suggests city leaders believe that Whole Foods is a force unto itself that can give a neighborhood the escape velocity it needs to break free of its doldrums. Are they right?

Whether the Whole Foods Effect is real, or the company is just extremely good at slipping into areas that would have gone upscale anyway, has never been directly quantified. But evidence suggests that Whole Foods can accelerate gentrification in particular ways. A new Whole Foods may not cause property values to shoot up on its own, but it can set into motion a series of events that change neighborhoods.

Take Gowanus, a windswept, post-industrial section of Brooklyn, N.Y., that’s home to a few bars and art spaces but is essentially a no man’s land sandwiched between the tonier neighborhoods of Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. Though Whole Foods announced in February it would open a 56,000-square-foot store there, Jim Cornell, senior vice president at Corcoran Group Real Estate, said prices in the neighborhood didn’t budge. “What [the announcement] did do, however, is give Gowanus, which already has a burgeoning arts and entertainment scene, additional credibility as a place to live,” he says. Fully half of his potential buyers have asked about the Whole Foods.

This “seal of approval” quality is Whole Foods’ Midas touch; as with streetcar tracks, potential gentrifiers see it as something tangible that certifies a neighborhood as a quality buy. And not just residents; businesses, too, look to Whole Foods as a disciplined pioneer that does its homework. (The retailer is debt-free, growing steadily and has 50 new stores in the pipeline.)  Sue Mosey, president of Detroit’s community development organization Midtown Inc. and a key player in bringing Whole Foods to Detroit, is hoping other businesses follow. “We definitely feel that just the signal that there’s a quality national operation moving in will interest other businesses,” she says.

But it’s not just what Whole Foods signifies — it’s the evidence of success that it generates. “Before a Whole Foods goes in, if there’s not much private investment in that district, there’s no data for developers to look at,” says Reid. A publicly traded behemoth is a data-generating machine. “You can go to their annual report and see how many customers they’re getting, how much traffic,” which lures other potential developers. And those other developers can bring Whole Foods’ numbers to a lender to get a loan. “To a lender and a developer, those are bankable numbers,” says Reid. “They’re as good as gold for a business.”

Which brings us back to how Whole Foods picks the locations where it can get those good numbers. Its most basic criterion is reportedly 200,000 people, a good portion of them college educated, living within a 20-minute drive. Amanda Musilli, the company’s Detroit Community Liaison, demurs when asked to elaborate, saying only that Midtown is “a community that’s going through a transformation right now.” About that, she’s absolutely right. The average household income of new home buyers in Midtown Detroit is now nearly $113,788, the highest in the city. And the neighborhood is facing a housing shortage (a miracle in Detroit), thanks to financial incentives offered to residents who move there. There’s also the $33,000-a-year College for Creative Studies nearby, packed with free-range foodies. If Whole Foods can succeed anywhere in Detroit, it’s here.

If it does, property values could eventually rise significantly. An exhaustive 2007 study by Johnson Reid quantified the effects that individual urban amenities have on home prices. Using hedonic modeling, it found that a specialty grocer will increase surrounding home prices by an average of 17.5 percent, more than bookstores, bike shops or gyms (with the caveat, of course, that this varies greatly depending on the situation — in the instances studied, the increases ranged widely from 6 to 29 percent).

But wait — I thought Whole Foods doesn’t raise real-estate prices. Not in isolation, and not right away. But like the retailer’s potential to attract residents and businesses, the Whole Foods Effect isn’t caused by the store itself, it’s caused by the events it sets into motion. And one thing Whole Foods does is stay open later than a lot of the other shops around it, laying the groundwork for expanding the length of that neighborhood’s day.

“What something like a movie theater or a Whole Foods does is it creates an extended-hours district,” says Reid. “Lots of downtowns close up shop at 6, but there are certain amenities that can make a downtown go from being a 10-hour thing to a 16-hour thing.” When this happens, evening foot traffic arrives, and new types of business can thrive. When Whole Foods moved onto P Street in Washington, D.C., 13 years ago, the only nightlife on the block was a divey (and awesome) rock club called the Vegas Lounge. The Lounge is still there, but it’s since been joined by a popular burger joint called Stoney’s, a “food-to-fork” locavore restaurant called Logan Tavern that owns a farm 30 miles south of the city, a Starbucks (open till 8 p.m.), a coffeehouse-slash-bar called Commissary and several retail stores, all squeezed onto the same block as Whole Foods.

Once evening-oriented development starts attracting people from outside the neighborhood, the area acquires what realtors call the “dwell factor,” a fancy way of saying it gets used in multiple ways. When we talk about the value of mixed-use neighborhoods, we’re often thinking of physical attributes — housing, retail, parks — but you could just as easily think of “mixed-use” in terms of time: school and work during the day, shopping in the afternoon and evening, restaurants, bars and entertainment well into the night.

Could a Safeway gentrify a neighborhood like Midtown Detroit? Could a Wal-Mart? Probably not in the same way. Not only do those brands not lure the high rollers that Whole Foods does, they don’t create an upscale version of what University of Chicago sociology professor Terry Nichols Clark calls the urban “scenescape,” the theory that public space is an idea as much as a physical place. Urban amenities have a multiplying effect on their immediate area — a Whole Foods is more likely to end up in a neighborhood with similar amenities, and vice versa. Jamaica Plain has had a big supermarket since 1964 called the Hi-Lo, known for its Latin-American items, which Whole Foods replaced. But the Hi-Lo didn’t gentrify the neighborhood — J.P. didn’t really start changing until the 1990s. That’s because Hi-Lo and Whole Foods aren’t just stores, they’re ideas that lead to similar ideas, and attract people who identify with those ideas in cyclical fashion.

Whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on what you believe your neighborhood needs: sustained affordability, or a gentrifying shot in the arm. Midtown Detroit is hoping for the latter. Unlike Jamaica Plain, where a vocal group of activists fought the new Whole Foods, opposition in Detroit has been virtually nonexistent. In fact, one of the most common concerns has been that Whole Foods will give the city a half-size store. (The company swears that it won’t.) Because just in practical terms, the city needs more places to buy groceries: Detroiters spend $200 million at suburban grocers each year because the city itself doesn’t have enough stores. But this is about more than having a supermarket. It’s about the gravitational force of a single establishment. In 2008, a gourmet grocery store called Zaccaro’s opened in Midtown — and closed less than a year later. Time will tell whether truffle oil will have better luck in the Motor City this time around.

Through this process, every last ounce of efficiency and performance is wrung out of each car. And so it will be with cities like PlanIT Valley, currently being built from scratch in northern Portugal. Slated for completion in 2015, PlanIT Valley won’t be a mere “smart city” — it will be a sentient city, with 100 million sensors embedded throughout, running on the same technology that’s in the Formula One cars, each sensor sending a stream of data through the city’s trademarked Urban Operating System (UOS), which will run the city with minimal human intervention.

“We saw an opportunity … to go create something that was starting with a blank sheet,” said PlanIT Valley creator Steve Lewis, “thinking from a systems-wide process in the same way we would think about computing technologies.”

Built-from-scratch cities have been popping up for years, but fully sentient ones are only in the prototype stage (PlanIT Valley will have just 150,000 residents). And their goal, as with all sentient beings, is to replicate. The percentage of global city dwellers will surge to 70 percent by 2050, and many of the fastest-growing cities are sprawling eco-disasters in the making. PlanIT Valley’s hyper-efficient model promises to be bright green. A white paper created by Living PlanIT, the company designing PlanIT Valley, details an techno-paradise of energy conservation. (Living PlanIT did not respond to requests for comment.) Cars are guided toward empty parking spaces, personal computers are engaged to run the UOS when they’re sitting idle, and rooms not only lower the air conditioning when you’ve left them (yes, the system will know when you’ve left them), but can even decide whether it’s worth it to do so based on how long you typically leave that room vacant.

But wait, there’s more! Leaky faucet? The UOS can detect it, and if it can’t do the repair remotely, will dispatch a plumber. Lose your child? Surveillance cameras might be swiveled to ascertain “the child’s current location and activity.” Apartment on fire? The UOS will alert the fire department, direct each resident to the safest exit, adjust the neighborhood’s traffic lights to clear a path for the incoming trucks, tell the firefighters which parts of the building are affected and the locations of anyone inside, automatically unlock doors and windows, increase pressure in that neighborhood’s water mains, and allocate patients in priority order when they arrive at the nearest hospital.

In many ways, this type of city epitomizes our attitudes toward modern technology, says Mark Shepard, an architect and the author of “Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space.” “From a tech perspective, we’re not really selling products and services anymore. We’re selling lifestyles,” he says. And the sentient-city lifestyle is sure to appeal to a certain brand of technophile. “Why not?” says Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, when asked if he’d live in a city like PlanIT Valley. “Provided I have control of my own information, which is a very basic principle we should ask for.”

But for the rest of us, this radical re-imagining of city life is a classic example of top-down urbanism, treating the residents as a problem to be solved rather than as part of the solution. Certainly, city governments need to provide for their people and run a tight ship, but a city that operates like a valet service works against urban life’s primary strength. There’s a great little poem by D.H. Lawrence called “The Third Thing”:

Water is H20, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,
But there is also a third thing, that makes it water
And nobody knows what that is.

Cities are more than the sum of their parts because it’s not their parts that make them great. It’s the thing in between those parts — if you live in a city, you know what I’m talking about. “Cities built from scratch have generally failed because they don’t become cities that people evolve through,” says Shepard. “Quite often, it’s the productive friction these places produce that make them dynamic.” Not that life in PlanIT Valley couldn’t end up being dynamic despite itself. “The funny thing about these cities programmed for efficiency, you find a lot of conversations about how to design serendipity back into them to make them more interesting,” says Usman Haque, founder of Pachube, an open Web service that manages real-time data.

Haque foresees that vital urban friction coming to PlanIT Valley, but not in preprogrammed form — rather, in the form of residents figuring out how to beat the system. “When you have more rigid structures, people get very creative in finding ways to get around it,” he says. You can picture PlanIT Valley following in the huge three-toed footsteps of Jurassic Park as “nature finds a way.” “The inhabitants will eventually want to reconfigure it and have an effect on it,” says Haque. “You either plan for that, or be surprised by the push-back.”

Some form of eventual push-back seems inevitable. Cities that segregate their citizens from the urbanization process risk ending up like Brasília, Brazil’s thoroughly planned, thoroughly unloved capital. And because it’s a prototype, pretty much everyone in PlanIT Valley will work for the companies that helped build it, making the sentient city a sentient workplace. “The thing that worries me is that these places become like urban factories, producing output that’s dictated,” says Haque. Who’s going to call in sick and go hit the beach when the UOS can tell when you’ve left your apartment?

Part of Brasília’s failure was its inflexibility, and PlanIT Valley has addressed this in part — indeed, the city is designed to be constantly tweaked according to the data. The difference is that, whereas PlanIT Valley will auto-tweak, a city like Boston is working hand in hand with residents to fix its streets — a cheaper, community-oriented method. An app called “Street Bump” developed last year by the mayor’s office of New Urban Mechanics was supposed to use drivers’ iPhones to create a virtual map of Boston’s potholes. Because iPhones can detect vibration, the idea was that drivers going about their commute would register bumps in the road on their phones, which would transmit that data back to city hall. It didn’t work very well (the iPhones mistook things like railroad crossings for potholes) so the city challenged armchair hackers to improve on it, with Liberty Mutual kicking in $25,000 for the winner. Three finalists were recently announced, and the city is now implementing the improved user-generated algorithms for a relaunch of the app this summer.

This isn’t just hippie-dippie idealism — it’s a better model. The city with 100 million sensors will cost $19 billion. Citizens engaged voluntarily? Free of charge. And how far this cool $19 billion will go is anybody’s guess — it’s impossible to predict whether today’s sentient cities will be responsive to tomorrow’s unforeseen urban problems. Had such a city opened 30 years ago, climate change might not have been a twinkle in its eye. It’s like those AT&T commercials from the ’90s that promised we’d all be sending faxes from the beach someday. This isn’t to suggest that climate change won’t be a problem in the future, only that it’s very difficult to predict what technologies will change the game going forward.

The technology isn’t the only wild card — the very idea of an Urban Operating System is a risky proposition. “Aerotropolis” author Greg Lindsay points out that a scaled-down version of it has been tried before, in New York City in the 1960s, when the RAND Corp. designed a computer model to streamline the city’s public services. Written about in Joe Flood’s book “The Fires,” the computer systematically withdrew fire protection from New York’s poorest neighborhoods, setting the stage for the blazes that would decimate the South Bronx over the next decade.

The lesson? Humans will act in ways that even the smartest computer model can fail to anticipate — which is fine, until you put your entire city in its hands. “What’s not being discussed is that cities are stubbornly resistant, highly unpredictable places,” says Shepard. “In the end, the unforeseen implications of this new technology will be the real story.”