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.

In that outrageous figure, you can see the root of the current backlash against historic districts. When Jacobs’ neighborhood was protected in 1969, it was no tony enclave. In fact, the justification for the urban-renewal project was that Greenwich Village was allegedly a slum. But now that the Village is wealthy, suddenly there are three expansions of its protective boundaries in six years. The timing invites cynical conclusions, bluntly summed up by urbanist Alon Levy on his blog last year: “Let us remember what historic districts are, in practice: They are districts where wealthy people own property that they want to prop up the price of.”

Restricting development in pricey neighborhoods, the new thinking goes, not only cements a city’s best sections as enclaves for the rich, it has wider anti-urban reverberations. It promotes suburbanization by pricing out the middle class. It prevents densification, the greenest, most efficient use of space and the defining characteristic of cities. And less density makes walkable, retail- and transit-oriented neighborhoods harder to sustain (though admittedly, this would never be a problem in a place like the Village, which is already far denser than most cities.)

It’s arguments like these that are pushing the usually planning-oriented New Urbanist crowd toward unlikely allies, like free-marketer Edward Glaeser, when it comes to historic districts. Glaeser was a speaker at last year’s annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism, where he advocated for his trademark belief that density trumps preservation. “They impede new construction,” Glaeser wrote in a manifesto against historic districts in 2010, “keeping real estate in New York City enormously expensive … especially in its most desirable, historically protected areas.”

Glaeser’s research showed that condo prices in such districts rose faster than average over three decades, and that their residents grew richer and whiter than the surrounding city. Other economists have asserted that historic districts “squeeze the balloon” — by restricting the amount of housing in fancier parts of the city, more fancy people must move outward, displacing poorer residents. Even Jane Jacobs acknowledged the importance of density. “Densities are too low, or too high, when they frustrate city diversity instead of abetting it,” she wrote in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”

If anything, today it’s the preservationist who is accused as promoting suspiciously suburban-ish values: low-density housing, exclusive enclaves, aesthetics over practicality. But it’s hard to believe that Greenwich Village, as it currently exists, could be “anti-urban” in any way. Isn’t it exactly what many of us picture when we think of the ideal city neighborhood?

Roberta Brandes Gratz says the market itself shows that people like these neighborhoods as they are, an argument people like Glaeser should love. “Isn’t it interesting that the Trumps of the world fight to build these new monstrosities on the periphery of the historic districts?” says Gratz, a member of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission until 2010. “They want the value that comes with building on the periphery of a traditional urban district, but they don’t want the rules. They want the benefit but they don’t want the burden.” Gratz doesn’t buy the argument that taller buildings necessarily lead to more density, either. “When they build these luxury condos they either have huge apartments or people are buying two and combining them.”

Technically, New Urbanist theory is agnostic on the age of buildings — more important is that neighborhoods be dense, walkable, mixed-use and transit-accessible. And Gratz argues that historic districts preserve many of these qualities. “There’s variety, a sense of place, street life, a mixture of uses,” she says. “When you develop a new place, you get Battery Park City,” Manhattan’s unloved outpost of sterile skyscrapers.

Furthermore, old buildings have tangible benefits. “The greenest building is the one you don’t have to build,” says preservation architect Jeffrey Chusid. He says historic districts yield high-paying jobs as well, since old houses require skilled labor. “When you have to teach people to repair and restore windows, you’re creating more local jobs than if you buy windows from a factory in China,” he says.

Chusid is a proponent of the idea that historic districts can benefit working-class people. He points to the Main Street Program in Texas, which aims to revitalize cities’ declining downtowns. “It’s focused on economic development but uses preservation as one of its tools,” he says. Chusid has also written about a working-class historic district in Austin, Texas, whose protected status has helped prevent speculative land grabs.

But perhaps the biggest argument for preservation is also the one that sounds the wishy-washiest: People just like old buildings, from brownstones in New York to Victorians in San Francisco. Even Emily Washington, a writer for the libertarian website MarketUrbanism.com, admits they appeal to her, despite herself. “I like historic districts,” she says. “But I think it’s important to look at the cost of preservation as well as the benefits.”

That cost-benefit analysis is tough to pull off. In hindsight, the benefits of saving Greenwich Village from urban renewal in the ’60s ended up outweighing the costs. Today, the neighborhood is tremendously loved and as far from being a “slum” as possible. It’s also a refuge for the wealthy, however, and could house many more people than it currently does. But maybe the biggest problem with expanding the Village’s protected boundaries now is that, in the words of social theorist David Harvey, Manhattan is becoming the world’s biggest gated community. Taking steps that will likely make it even pricier could keep its real estate eclectic, but in the process, help make its diversity a thing of the past.

Manny Roth remembers when such diversity — of races, incomes and general freakishness — infused the Village back in the ’50s and ’60s, when he owned Cafe Wha? and the Bitter End. Both venues would fall within the expanded preservation zone if the proposal goes through. Roth (uncle of Van Halen’s David Lee) is now 93 and lives in California. But he remembers those days well, when he gave a young man named Bob Dylan, who had just breezed into town, a chance to perform three songs on his tiny stage, as well as Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen and others who would become legends. “If you go to Cafe Wha? today, my floor is still there, I laid it myself,” says Roth, who lived in the club when he first opened it, bathing in the bathroom sink.

Perhaps surprisingly, when told that the city is considering landmarking the area that includes his old clubs, Roth is unsentimental. “What do I care?” he says. “I’m 93 years old. I have my memories.” Wouldn’t he like to see the city preserve the place where those memories were formed? “Look, most of the greats came from the Village. Cafe Au Go Go was where Lenny Bruce played. Circle in the Square. Le Figaro. The Village Gate. How good does it get? I understand why they want to save it. But that was then.”

It wasn’t just buildings — it was a moment in history. “I was in the right place at the right time,” he says.

Such a dispassionate attitude, divorced from nostalgia and personal wealth concerns, could ease the process of deciding what to save and what to leave to the whims of capitalism. Landmarking is meant to preserve structures whose loss would be an affront to history. Removing entire neighborhoods from the natural evolution of cities is another thing entirely.

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.”

Washington gets some flak (not nearly enough) for not raising the federal gas tax. The last time it budged, a T-Rex was chasing Jeff Goldblum, and Meat Loaf was in the Top 40. But individual states are just as guilty of keeping their gas taxes frozen, which, because of inflation, effectively adds up to more deeply discounted gas every year. Fourteen states haven’t raised their gas taxes in at least two decades, including New Jersey, which now has the nation’s third-lowest rate — it hasn’t gone up since 1988. This has caused the state’s real-dollar gas-tax revenue to fall by 40 percent. By not keeping the tax apace with transportation costs, New Jersey loses half a billion dollars a year.

When we talk about the federal gas tax being too low, we talk about the fact that keeping the price of gas down encourages sprawl and discourages sales of fuel-efficient cars — both worthy concerns. But by ignoring the problem of states refusing to raise their rates as well, we miss out on the fact that, for instance, New Jersey’s Transportation Trust Fund is now $12.5 billion in debt. Wyoming last year voted down an attempt to raise its gas tax, the country’s second-lowest, which would have allowed it to repair underground storage tanks that are leaking petroleum into the earth. And South Carolina, which borrowed $52 million from Washington last year to close a budget gap created by its super-low gas tax, recently moved to cut that tax by 10 percent more.

And why not? Gas is expensive now, right? The truth is, the price of gas is unnaturally low, held down by governors who would sooner take a handout from Washington than increase the price by a penny per gallon. This thinking is creating a fiscal disaster for state governments. And it’s put New Jersey on track to earn a dubious distinction: By mid-century, it will become the first state in America to literally run out of land. By making “drive till you qualify” so cheap, all the Garden State’s unprotected open space will be completely gone in a few short decades.

Maybe it’s best if we just drive around it.

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.

How the Mormon mecca became a nip-tuck town is a bit of a mystery — one theory is that moms here tend to be younger, which leads to more “mommy makeovers.” And though it’s tempting to assume they spend more on their cars because they need snow-friendly SUVs, cities like Denver and Albany, N.Y., spend far less on theirs.

Point being, Los Angeles doesn’t deserve its superficial rep any more than lots of other cities. Washingtonians blow more money on clothes. Atlanta gets more hair transplants. New Orleans watches more TV. And of the 50 biggest cities, L.A. has the 11th most college degrees per square mile. “As someone who’s lived in both New York and D.C., I can say with certainty that Los Angeles is no more shallow than either of those two cities, both of which are considered to be loci for deep and thoughtful people,” says Cord Jefferson, staffer at Los Angeles-based Good Magazine. “Shallow people live everywhere, and there’s not a surplus of them in L.A.”

Boston sports fans are fanatics

Lots of stats support this, but one blew our minds: Despite having the league’s highest ticket prices, the last Red Sox game that didn’t sell out was played in 2003. The 712-game sellout streak has become baseball legend, and it’s well earned — a full one-third of the city attends a Boston pro-sports event every year. As such, the city’s rabid fan base is seen as an advertising gold mine. A marketing study of 81 cities pegged Boston’s pro-sports fans as the nation’s most passionate, with two-thirds identifying as “avid.” Brand Keys Inc., a company that studies customer engagement, compiles an annual Sports Fan Loyalty Index, and only Boston’s teams regularly make the top five in all of the major pro-sports categories.

As stereotypes go, this one’s well deserved. Somehow we doubt they’ll mind the label.

New York drivers are nuts

New Yorkers have a reputation for driving like they’re being chased by a tidal wave. But by the numbers, New York motorists appear to be less dangerous than those in several other cities. According to Allstate Insurance, drivers in Philadelphia, Washington and Los Angeles suffer more collisions per capita. And Orlando, Fla., drivers kill far more pedestrians (though pedestrian-unfriendly infrastructure surely plays a part in this).

So why the sense of mayhem? New York City cab driver Eugene Salomon points to a taxi-dominated streetscape, where drivers are both in competition and paid by the mile-per-hour. “In those off-peak hours it’s a horse race to find the next fare,” he says. Plus, Manhattan is flooded with drivers from New Jersey, who are more crash-prone, says Allstate.

But New Yorkers needn’t boast. They scored dead last on a recent nationwide rules-of-the-road quiz. And the NYPD often seems more concerned with ticketing bicyclists than enforcing safe driving. Salomon, for his part, thinks the worst drivers are in L.A. “I felt intimidated on their damned expressways,” he says. After that, however, “I’d say New Yorkers are the second craziest.”

Miami is all gym rats

Would that Miami were a perpetual Spuds Mackenzie-era beer commercial. Alas, it just ain’t so, says the 10-days-to-better-abs bible, Men’s Fitness. In 2009, the magazine ranked Miami as America’s fattest big city, with over 60 percent of its residents at risk for weight-related health problems. Miami also has three times as many fast-food joints as the national average. And though lots of Miamians own gym memberships, fewer than average actually use them. The city’s high poverty rate correlates with its high obesity numbers.

Miami-based personal trainer Shuichi Take sees the gym-rat stereotype as stemming from the outsize visibility of hot spots like South Beach, as well as the city’s “semi-legitimate modeling scene.” The weather also makes Miami a prime spot for the type of sports pursued by the shirtless and beautiful. “Volleyball, paddle boarding, kite boarding, wake boarding,” says Take, “Miami is an outdoor-activity town.”

Las Vegas is filled with gamblers

The Strip may be for tourists, but Vegas locals gamble, too. According to a study conducted by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, gambling and going to the movies virtually tie as Clark County residents’ two preferred ways to spend time. Nearly two-thirds of the city’s residents gamble occasionally. By comparison, only a quarter of Americans gambled in a casino in 2010.

Anthony Curtis, president of the city guide LasVegasAdvisor.com, thinks those stats give a warped perception of life in Las Vegas, which he says is thoroughly pedestrian for the typical resident. “People here do everything they’d do in Detroit or Atlanta or anywhere else,” he says. “Sometimes they may go to a show or a comedy club and it happens to be in a casino, and while they’re there they’ll put twenty bucks in a machine.”

Everyone in Salt Lake City is a Mormon

It’s not the holy land it used to be; less than half the city follows the Church of Latter-day Saints, and Utah as a whole is only around 60 percent Mormon these days. Statewide, the percentage of Mormons has been declining for years, according to secret church membership counts obtained by the Salt Lake City Tribune in 2005. Experts attribute the drop to Hispanic immigrants moving to Utah for jobs, not religion. If current trends continue, Utah will lose its Mormon majority by 2030.

Local non-Mormon Steven Kachocki thinks the city is slowly becoming more progressive as a result. “Although we suffer from alcohol-deprivation, there certainly seem to be more same-sex couples than there were even five years ago,” he says. “As it is with our sense of style in Utah — about 10 years behind the rest of the country — so will be our move to more liberal thinking.”

Portland is all hipsters

In 2001, the Portland Oregonian reported that sales of Pabst Blue Ribbon — at the time, an obscure beer associated with blue-collar roughnecks — were inexplicably soaring in Portland. PBR soon caught on everywhere else, and the city has been seen as a hipster epicenter ever since, spawning dedicated blogs, newspaper Style section paeans and a satirical TV show.

The conventional wisdom that Portland is filled with hipsters is deserved, thinks Michael Andersen, publisher of Portland Afoot: “More so than anywhere else I’ve lived,” he says. And several hipster-correlated metrics do seem to confirm the stereotype (using, of course, more stereotypes): The city has the highest percentage of bicycle commuters in America, PETA ranks it as the country’s second veggie-friendliest city, and Oregon — at least as of 2008 — remains the world’s top consumer of sweet, goes-down-smooth PBR.

Portlandians can be sensitive to the hipster label. “As I understand it, hipsters are young creative people who aspire to a kind of independent culture,” says Marc Moscato, an artist, curator, activist and president of the Dill Pickle Club, a nonprofit that organizes educational projects about Portland. “But there’s sort of a negative connotation to the word too, some even going so far as to say they [hipsters] are ruining Portland by the increasing gentrification and displacement.” Which is ironic, since Moscato and Andersen both believe it’s the city’s affordable housing that draws the young and creative. Before you know it, those PBRs will be two bucks a can.

It’s a slo-mo ’70s disaster flick that seems too improbable to panic about — cheap, clean water-on-demand is, after all, practically an American birthright. But another birthright (one that we’ve exercised liberally) is the right to move to illogical places: car-dependent exurbs, coastal flood plains and, most recently, very dry cities. Of the past decade’s 10 fastest-growing metro regions, three get less than 15 inches of rain a year, and several of the others are prone to severe dry spells. Yet these cities have grown as if they had all the rain in Seattle — complete with omnipresent lush lawns, swimming pools and golf courses — just as climate scientists are predicting that they’re about to get even drier.

“When I talk to water utility people, one of the things I say to them is, ‘I bet most of you aren’t planning how to manage your water demands with 20 percent less than what you have now,’” says Charles Fishman, author of “The Big Thirst.” “If you don’t have a plan for that, you’re in trouble.”

You’ll find Fishman’s book in the nature section at Barnes & Noble, but it’s really about urban planning. Because the creeping hydro-crisis has nothing to do with “running out of water.” The earth has the same amount of water as it had 4 billion years ago, and it always will. “It’s all Tyrannosaurus rex pee,” says Fishman with a laugh. The water’s recycled endlessly through the clouds, but it’s the way we’ve built that’s made it seem scarce — with industry, farming and cities in places where there’s not enough water to support them, but still demanding more every year.

Luckily, an urban-planning problem can be mitigated with urban-planning solutions, and cities are blazing the trail — including, believe it or not, Sin City itself. Today, Vegas is soaked in “reclaimed water,” water that’s been used once and then purified for another go-round. It waters the golf courses and washes the thousands of hotel bed sheets. Even the pond at Treasure Island, where the nightly pirate-ship battles take place, is filled with water that the hotel’s guests have brushed their teeth with. (It gets run through a treatment plant under the casino.)

But even reclaimed water has a way of vanishing in a place where the sun shines 300 days a year — some estimates suggest Lake Mead loses half its water to evaporation. One solution? Store it underground, says Tom Brikowski, professor of hydrology at the University of Texas-Dallas. “It could work in a lot of places and it’s starting to be done now.” For instance, Tampa, Fla., is trying it out with a method called aquifer storage and recovery, pumping water into the earth when it rains, then extracting it during the drier months.

It’s an artificial version of how Los Angeles’ water supply operates naturally. California gets nearly all its precipitation in the winter, much of it as snow in the eastern Sierras. As the snow slowly melts through the summer, it becomes part of the state’s water supply — nearly 5 trillion gallons trickling toward Los Angeles, San Diego and other Southern California cities. Climate change is wreaking havoc on this system. “We depend on that water staying up in the mountains as snow through August,” says Andrew Schwartz, an engineer for the state’s Department of Water Resources. “Now, a lot of the precipitation that used to fall as snow is falling as rain, and the stuff that still falls as snow is melting faster.”

Making things worse, on its way south, this water flows through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The rising sea levels are turning the delta saltier, rendering some of the water undrinkable. It’s a one-two punch that California may try to fight with what Schwartz says would be “the biggest construction project in the country,” an enormous water tunnel that would bypass the delta and head to cities in the southern part of the state.

Such a project would cost billions. Changing a city’s culture is far cheaper, and while California is reasonably water conscious, in San Antonio, conserving water is a religion. In the ’90s, the city was sued by the Sierra Club for draining the Edwards Aquifer. The aquifer happens to be the home of the Texas blind salamander, an endangered amphibian. A small culture war ensued, but after a few years of predictable hippies-versus-cowboys animus, something incredible happened: San Antonio became a capital of conservation chic. Low-flush toilets became status symbols, and overwatering your lawn could get a person ostracized. Water consumption dropped from 200 to 130 gallons per person per day. And suddenly, droughts that crippled neighboring cities weren’t affecting San Antonians. “I hate to say ‘big government,’” says Brikowski, “but these regional plans where everyone shares the sacrifice are pretty effective.”

Compare that to Brikowski’s hometown of Dallas, the “water hog” of Texas, where no such stigma exists, and the average resident uses more than twice as much water as a San Antonian. Between 1980 and 1999, as other big Texas cities slashed their water consumption, Dallas’ grew by 35 percent. And now Dallas, like Vegas, is looking for water elsewhere — specifically, east Texas and Oklahoma. “It’s not that they need the water to survive,” one irate east Texan told the Wall Street Journal. “What they want is to destroy our wildlife so they’ll have enough water for their grass.”

The kicker is this: Dallas isn’t even that parched. It typically gets only a few inches less rain than Boston each year, and even during last year’s epic drought, it still got 26 inches. Likewise, Florida. The so-called Sunshine State gets tons of rain yet suffers from water shortages, says Fishman, simply because they don’t bother to use it. “Forty-eight inches of water fall as rain on every square foot of Florida. They gather it, put it in a drain, and ship it right out to the ocean. And then they take their water supply from an aquifer under the state, and that aquifer is tapped.”

In other words, it’s not the water that’s bad, it’s the system. “The system is set up to dispose of storm water, and then there’s a vast, separate infrastructure that depends on groundwater,” says Fishman. Unifying these systems — drinking water, wastewater and storm water — could transform a city from one with chronic water shortages to an oasis of hydration.

There’s nothing icky about it. Dallas’ wastewater is so fit for reuse that another city drinks it — Houston, 250 miles down the Trinity River, where Dallas dumps its wastewater. People grimace at the phrase “toilet-to-tap,” a water-treatment option that’s spawned many a gross-out news story. But lots of us drink such water already. “The water in Houston has been through Dallas toilets,” Brikowski says bluntly.

If rivers like the Trinity can move water from city to city, why can’t we? Could waterlogged Baton Rouge send its overflow to Oklahoma City? Believe it or not, the idea has been floated. Patricia Mulroy, Las Vegas’ celebrated water czar, wants the U.S. to construct transnational canals to transport water from the Mississippi Valley to the dusty Midwest.

Fishman sees a more realistic scenario in which “places like Chicago start using their water supplies to woo companies.” Companies like Intel, whose water-guzzling microchip plants sit near bone-dry Phoenix. This could could have all sorts of implications for where economic growth occurs in the future — shifting, for instance, the balance of prosperity from the Sun Belt back to the Rust Belt. And it might not be too far off. Because while the average person may not think much about the future of water, says Fishman, “these huge corporations have water security on their top-five lists of critical issues.”

Till then, small changes can make a big difference. Fishman recalls how, in the 1950s, Hong Kong, just beginning to industrialize, mandated that its toilets be flushed with seawater. Today, the city’s population has quadrupled, and 80 percent of its toilets still work that way. Because of one forward-thinking tweak, today Hong Kong saves 73 billion gallons of water a year. “That would supply a city of 2 million,” says Fishman — the population of Las Vegas, it just so happens. “It’s a perfect example of how organization can have a huge impact on outcome.”

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.

The linchpin of this theory is the Bystander Effect, which suggests that our failure to react is caused by the urban environment. It was first established in 1968 after the notorious murder of Kitty Genovese, the young Queens woman who was killed while dozens of witnesses looked on. But in the decades since, our knowledge of the Bystander Effect has evolved even further. Now we can even predict which people — in which cities — are most likely to help out a stranger.

Psychologist Dr. Harold Takooshian sees strong evidence of the Bystander Effect in Neistat’s bike-theft experiment. “When it comes to this fellow with the bike,” he says, “there are several reasons the people don’t intervene.”

“The first is that they don’t notice what’s going on — many people in the video simply don’t seem to see him. We call that stimulus overload. People in cities are surrounded by much more stimuli, so they filter things out. The second is that they notice him, but what’s happening is ambiguous, so they actively ignore it.” In other words: Why would someone so brazenly steal a bike? There must be an innocent explanation. “The third is that people notice it, but they don’t know what to do. And the fourth is fear — they know they should do something, but they’re afraid to challenge someone with a hacksaw.”

“Apathy,” concludes Dr. Takooshian, “is only a minor factor.”

The first two possibilities, stimulus overload and ambiguity, are both influenced by density, a key indicator of whether people are likely to intervene. It’s easy to understand why urban density leads to stimulus overload and might cause a passerby to miss something. But density — specifically, a space dense with people — heightens ambiguity too, in a very particular way.

“Say you’re in a city, and it looks like someone is about to steal a bicycle,” says Ervin Staub, author of “Overcoming Evil” and a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. “It’s already a somewhat ambiguous situation. Maybe the person is trying to get their own bicycle. But it’s made even more ambiguous because there are many other people around, all these potential helpers, and no one is taking action. That communicates something to you.”

In short: If you see people acting like something is no big deal, you assume the same. It’s the same reason comedy clubs hire professional laughers — we act like the people around us. Staub describes an experiment he once conducted in which two people sit in a room, one of them secretly working for the psychologist. Suddenly there are shouts of distress from a neighboring room. If the psychologist’s helper worries aloud that something is wrong, the subject goes to investigate “100 percent of the time.” But if the helper says he thinks everything is probably fine, three out of four subjects will stay put.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the field of urban psychology was pioneered by Stanley Milgram, whose famous electrical shock experiments demonstrated how willing we are to take our cues from others. It’s human nature to be wary of going against the norm. That’s why the Bystander Effect varies so greatly from city to city — if you’re in a place where people are apt to intervene, you probably will too. And if you’re not, you won’t.

This fact was illustrated brilliantly in 2003 by Dr. Robert Levine, a professor of psychology at Cal State-Fresno, who spent six years studying people’s willingness to help strangers in different cities. Levine’s assistants dropped pens, faked injuries and feigned blindness from Los Angeles to Madrid to Singapore, and found that not only did the differences in intervention rates vary widely, they could even be predicted.

For instance, the five Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking cities that he studied all scored much higher than average on the intervention scale, and the top two were Rio de Janeiro and San Jose, Costa Rica. He consulted with Latin America experts and learned of the Spanish word “simpatico,” a highly valued social quality that means, in part, a willingness to help others. The easiest way to show it? Public displays of assistance.

Cities with weaker economies also tended to exhibit more instances of kindness toward strangers, leading Levine to conclude that places where “social obligations take priority over individual achievement tend to be less economically productive.”

And even the pace at which people walked in a city turned out to be a strong indicator. New York, home of the speed walker, ranked almost dead last for strangers helping each other, and even when help was offered, it was usually terse and noncommittal. “During the dropped pen experiment, for example, helpful New Yorkers would typically call to the experimenter that he had dropped his pen, then quickly move on in the opposite direction.”

David De Porte, a blind New Yorker who uses a cane, has lived in the city for decades. “I find that people in New York are very willing to help,” he says — even more so than in the suburbs. “People here are used to walking so they’re more attuned to other pedestrians.” In the suburbs, “It’s a car culture, and they don’t even seem to see other people.”

As to who is most likely to stop and assist him, he has a ranking at the ready: first, the elderly, followed by other disabled people, then African-Americans and Hispanics, and finally, blue-collar workers, “like construction workers, though maybe that’s because they’re just standing around.” Least likely? “Yuppies and young people,” who he believes might be too preoccupied with their phones.

De Porte and I take a stroll around his neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, a busy area filled with starfish-shaped intersections and construction sites. (As we navigate these, I’m clearly more nervous than he is.) Within 10 minutes, De Porte, who walks slower than the prevailing pace, is sideswiped by two people: a tall guy with Club Monaco bags who yells “sorry” over his shoulder, and a woman in a hoodie who just power-walks on. Each time it happens De Porte has to stop and reorient himself. I’m horrified, but he takes it in stride. “See? He said sorry,” he cheerfully reassures me.

I ask him to stand at an intersection to see if anyone will help him cross the street while I hang back and act like a smartphone-addicted yuppie. Within about half a minute, a young, artsy-looking woman tells him he’s got the walk signal and can go. We do it again, and again, a middle-aged woman tells him when it’s time to walk. Neither one of them escorts him across the street, which seems to confirm Dr. Levine’s finding that New Yorkers are more likely to offer only a perfunctory form of help. But it could also be that they don’t feel comfortable taking a stranger by the arm. Or maybe they think De Porte himself wouldn’t be comfortable with that. During his study, one of Levine’s assistants tried to help a blind New Yorker cross the street and was told, “When I want help, I’ll ask for it. Mind your own business.”

It’s a classic urban paradox — we live stacked on top of each other, but hurry into our apartments when we hear someone coming down the hallway. We want to be left alone in a crowd. In “The Experience of Living in Cities,” the 1970 paper credited with launching the field of urban psychology, Stanley Milgram wrote about this peculiar form of antisocial urbanism. “Cities develop new norms of noninvolvement,” he wrote. “These are so well-defined and so deeply a part of city life that they constitute the norms people are reluctant to violate. Men are actually embarrassed to give up a seat on the subway to an old woman; they mumble ‘I was getting off anyway,’ instead of making the gesture in a straightforward and gracious way.”

As urbanites, we may not lack a moral compass, but our sense of direction is clear: We move forward almost instinctively, even when it makes more sense not to. It gets us where we’re going, but we lose a lot of bikes in the process.