Who helps whom? Rethinking helping behavior across the city and the suburb.

A few weeks ago, I found myself in the middle of a New York City street with two small children and two strollers. I needed help. The strollers were awkwardly positioned, the children were with me, and I was clearly struggling to get everything moving again.

People walked past. Some looked. A few commented. But no one stopped to help. I remember thinking, this is strange. Not because I expected New Yorkers to be exceptionally generous. And certainly not because I had never experienced kindness in New York. I have lived and worked in the city for years, and some of my strongest experiences of community have happened there.

But I had become accustomed to something different in the suburb where I now live. In the suburbs, I experience help in a much more immediate and personal way. Someone sees me struggling with a stroller and comes over. Someone holds the door when my hands are full. Someone notices that I'm trying to get something across the street and simply asks if I need a hand. These are small gestures. They rarely amount to much. But they have made me think about a much bigger question: what makes people notice one another?

I started looking into this question and came across the work of psychologist Robert Levine and his colleagues, who studied helping behavior across American cities. In one well-known study, “Helping in 36 U.S. Cities”, researchers observed how often strangers helped one another in everyday situations. They then compared those behaviors with characteristics of the cities where they occurred. The differences between cities were significant. Among the characteristics they examined, population density was one of the most consistent factors associated with helping behavior.

But it's easy to oversimplify that. It doesn't mean that people in denser cities simply care less about one another, or that suburbs are kinder by nature. Because helping takes different forms. In a suburb like the one I currently live in, you feel helping in the direct interactions. In New York, you might feel solidarity through organizations, tenant groups, or mutual aid networks. Both are real and meaningful.

That contrast made me think differently about the places where we live. Maybe the question isn't whether people in cities are kinder than people in suburbs or the other way around. Maybe the more interesting question is: what kinds of helping does a place make possible? In some places, helping means stopping on the sidewalk to pick up a stranger's stroller. In others, it might mean organizing a tenant association, fighting for better schools, or building a coalition around a shared concern. Both are forms of care. They simply operate at different scales.

As an urban planner, I'm interested in the space between these two scales. How do we create places where people can maintain the benefits of urban life, diversity, density, collective action while also creating opportunities for people to notice one another. With two children and two strollers in the middle of a street, that question felt very real.