For years, Beverly Hills has been trying to derail the planned alignment of the West Side Subway Extension, saying it would be safer to run it beneath Santa Monica Boulevard (though their own study indicates otherwise). The threat of lawsuits and endless public hearings have delayed the project but not killed it; now opponents have released a video claiming that the subway could ignite pockets of methane gas and blow the school to bits. "Methane gas, toxic chemicals and teenagers don't mix," intones the grim voiceover, "but this dangerous combination is on the verge of exploding at Beverly High." Smash-cut to Michael Bay-esque footage of teen-filled hallways consumed by raging fireballs.

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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.)

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But here's what else is funny: According to a recent analysis, the population of downtown Cleveland is surging, doubling in the past 20 years. What's more, the majority of the growth occurred in the 22-to-34-year-old demo, those coveted "knowledge economy" workers for whom every city is competing. Pittsburgh, too, has unexpectedly reversed its out-migration of young people. The number of 18-to-24-year-olds was declining there until 2000, but has since climbed by 16 percent. St. Louis attracted more young people than it lost in each of the past three years. And as a mountain of "Viva Detroit!" news stories have made clear, Motor City is now the official cool-kids destination, adding thousands of young artists, entrepreneurs and urban farmers even as its general population evaporates.

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And that may be. But it's also true that the Austin, Texas-based retailer has made a science of putting down roots in urban locations at what often seems to be just the right moment. In Washington, D.C., near Logan Circle in 2000, Uptown New Orleans and the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh in 2002, Boston's "Latin Quarter" in Jamaica Plain in 2011 -- areas that other specialty grocers might have considered unworthy of goat cheese and ostrich eggs, but that were actually on the verge of a boom that, lo and behold, kicked into high gear as soon as Whole Foods moved in.

"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."

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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.

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Exactly how this happened, however, doesn't get as much ink. We just assume that a lot of the kids who watched "Friends" in the '90s decided they'd like to engage in witty repartee at Central Perk. But that's just a small slice of what caused the massive shift that Alan Ehrenhalt details in his new book, released this week, "The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City." In a wide-ranging survey of gentrified urban cores, struggling exurbs and outer-ring suburbs that went from lily white to multicultural seemingly overnight, he identifies the trends, policies and mayors that propelled the largest migration since the postwar suburban boom, and speculates on what our cities will look like 10 years down the road.

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It was simple, elegant, effective -- and a peek at the urban future, when "smart cities" will collect data of all kinds (in all kinds of ways) and use it to make themselves better places to live. The Paris wristband project shows how these efforts are already taking place, as urbanites conceive of solutions to their cities' problems through creative uses of technology. It's urban resourcefulness at its finest.

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It's the sort of character you might expect a Jane Jacobs devotee to follow in lockstep. But the people transforming today's cities don't forge their allegiances so predictably. Now, the developer who wants to demolish a row of historic houses to build a 50-story high-rise might be seen as the true urban savior -- not the preservationist who wants to prevent him from doing so.

To see this shift in action, look no further than the site of Jacobs' most famous battle, Greenwich Village. Fifty years ago, a high-rise urban-renewal project threatened to eviscerate the neighborhood. But local activists successfully quashed it, and the Village, now one of Manhattan's most desirable neighborhoods, has enjoyed historic designation since 1969. The protected area has been expanded twice recently, in 2006 and 2010, and last month, the Preservation League of New York State recommended expanding it once again. The latest expansion would encompass clubs where Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce once offended upper-crust sensibilities -- which is funny, since the average Greenwich Village apartment now sells for upward of $2 million.

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Thanks to a quirk of history, the East River bridges to Manhattan aren't tolled, nor are the outbound Hudson tunnels -- you can drive from Long Island to New Jersey for free if you go through Manhattan. Go around Manhattan, however, and you'll hit tolls of up to $13. The system gives drivers a financial incentive to drive straight through the most crowded, most congested patch of land in the country.

With gas taxes, we make the same mistake: We artificially depress the price of fuel so that the least efficient way to get somewhere -- in this case, a private car -- is also sometimes the cheapest.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has given us an opportunity to discuss this absurdity. On Tuesday, the New York Times revealed the true reason he killed plans for a new rail tunnel from New York to New Jersey. Yes, he was genuflecting before Tea Party deficit hawks, but, said the paper, the decision was actually "more about avoiding the need to raise the state’s gasoline tax."

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Los Angeles is superficial

Sun-baked idiots who care more about Beemers and boob jobs than culture and current events. That's how we think of Los Angeles, but it more aptly describes a more God-fearing locale: Salt Lake City, which has the most plastic surgeons per capita, Googles the phrase "breast implants" with alarming frequency, and spends more money on both cars and cosmetic procedures than any other city in the nation.

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That's not going to work in Las Vegas. Nevertheless, Vegas' main water source, Lake Mead, is nearly tapped out. The water level there will soon drop below one of the city's two pipelines. So they're building a third pipe, except this one will come up from underneath the lakebed, like a drain. Even that may not be enough -- Lake Mead could be empty as early as 2021. So the city has hatched a scheme for a 300-mile pipeline that will siphon water from the eastern half of the state to the Strip. And if that plan doesn't work ...

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He was right. Dozens of pedestrians hurried by as he destroyed his bike lock with hacksaws and power tools on various busy sidewalks, seeming to confirm a stereotype about New Yorkers: "People are so busy that we keep our heads down and go to work," he says. "People are so caught up in their own (life) that they're not concerned with yours."

Are New Yorkers -- and city folk in general -- really so busy and self-absorbed that we have no concern for others? Do we lack a moral compass? Is Rick Santorum right? For more than 50 years, "urban psychologists" have been faking seizures, dropping cash and breaking into cars in broad daylight to see if strangers would intervene. They've discovered two things. One is that people in rural areas do indeed get involved more readily than urbanites. But they've also concluded that this has very little to do with morality.

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The new waterside park, nicknamed PORT, will be very small -- less than three-quarters of an acre. But that doesn't mean it won't be packed with amenities, including a playground, an amphitheater, three geodesic domes and a circuitous series of walking paths separated from its grasses and flowers by low gray walls.

It's the kind of park you might call "innovative," and there are lots of things to like about it. If you're interested in architecture and design, the geodesic domes and amphitheaters are superb. Likewise for those who prefer the tailored feel of a botanic garden, and for people looking to boost real-estate values or spur development in the surrounding area.

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Five months later, locals are unhappy about the "eyesore" their new neighbor has created: a 50,000-ton hill of steel. "Where did the scrap metal pile come from?" asked a Providence TV station.

It's the epilogue to a battle that's been raging in Providence for several years -- on one side, a developer who wanted to turn the shoreline into apartments, offices and hotels. On the other, the maritime industries that have been working there since the turn of last century. In the end, industry won, but the complaints that followed -- who put this big, ugly heap of metal on our lovely industrial port? -- say something about our attitude toward working waterfronts.

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Whether more glamour will translate into more riders is yet to be seen. But one thing is certain: When it comes to improving mass transit, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit on the humble city bus. The vital connective tissue of multi-modal transit systems, the bus could be an efficient -- nay, elegant -- solution to cities' mobility woes if only we made it so.

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You could say the same about Athens itself. After businesses fled in the '80s, downtown Athens rebounded as an alt-rock mecca that spawned the soundtrack of Generation X. R.E.M., the B-52s, Widespread Panic and thousands of other musicians and artists helped create what is, in many ways, today a dream city: a mixed-use, walkable urban core filled with small businesses, plenty of green space -- and a music scene that rivals that of cities 10 times its size.

Cue "The End of the World as We Know It." A multi-building mall-like shopping complex, likely to include the dreaded Walmart, has set its sights on downtown Athens. Renderings by the Atlanta-based developer Selig Enterprises show a bricked concourse surrounded by large-scale retail, including a 94,000-square-foot superstore, topped with apartments. It also includes three restaurants -- two of which are over 10,000 square feet -- and 1,150 parking spaces. This is new for downtown Athens, which unlike most college towns, has largely kept chains away.

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Just as critical, however, is the fact that the baby boomers, retiring at a clip of 10,000 a day, are hunkering down way out in the suburbs -- and sometimes much farther afield.

"You've got this whole generation that moved to the suburbs thanks to government subsidies," says Howard Gleckman, author of "Caring for Our Parents" and a fellow at the Urban Institute. "They got tax breaks for moving there and now they're staying." Even city-dwelling boomers -- up to 65 percent of them -- head for the land of the lawns once the kids move out.

As they have every right to. But a census-busting generation growing unprecedentedly old while scattered so wide will make caring for aging boomers vastly more complicated. Yet rather than incentivize the next generation of seniors to move to urban areas -- where transit, services and walkable neighborhoods abound -- an array of factors actually discourage them from doing so. How do we fix this?

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The Tea Party soared to power on the notion that it was the antidote to wasteful government spending. It's now clear that reigniting the culture wars was a top priority, too. From guns to abortion, the extremist wing of the Republican Party has fought to turn back the clock on many socially progressive ideals.

Mass transit is its newest target.

"Federal transportation and infrastructure policy has traditionally been an area of strong bipartisan agreement," says Aaron Naparstek, a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and founder of Streetsblog.org. "Now, it seems, Republicans want to turn cities into a part of the culture wars. Now it's abortion, gay marriage and subways."

House Republicans seek to eliminate the Mass Transit Account from the federal Highway Trust Fund. The Mass Transit Account is where public transportation programs get their steady source of funding. Without it, transit would be devastated, and urban life as we know it could become untenable.

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The last two remaining strip clubs in Boston's notorious "Combat Zone" may soon host their final lap dances, says Boston magazine. The neighborhood, once a garish carnival of smut, has fully upscaled. The newest hot spot is a swanky bar at the W that actually boasts design touches paying homage to the street's bygone sex dens.

We all know this story. America's urban sleaze centers have zipped up and retreated into the night. The Combat Zone was flushed out, the Sunset Strip sanitized, Times Square Giuliani'd. But almost as soon as they were gone, nostalgia bloomed. When Times Square's last seedy strip club closed two years ago, New York magazine lamented that its streets had been "completely lost to Bubba Gumps and T.G.I. Fridays." One poll showed 65 percent of New Yorkers preferred the Times Square of hookers and skin flicks. What could a neighborhood of peep shows, porno and prostitutes possibly offer a city?

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On Dec. 31, the Chinese capital opened a new subway line and greatly expanded two others. This year it plans to open four more. A total of eight new lines are under construction. The city started expanding the system in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, and has kept pushing forward ever since. In 2001 it had 33 miles of track. Today it has 231.

Meanwhile, when you hear the completion dates for big U.S. transit projects you often have to calculate your age to figure out if you'll still be alive. Los Angeles's Westside subway extension is set to be finished in 2036. Just five years ago, New York's Second Avenue Subway was supposed to be done by 2020, a goal that seems laughable now.

And while it's not fair to compare American projects to China's -- where protections for workers and the environment are flimsy, and tight construction schedules can sacrifice workmanship -- there are nonetheless several factors that conspire to keep American mass-transit projects in a state of perpetual limbo. Here are seven culprits, listed roughly in order of guilt.

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