Vision of the Metropolitan Institue
Below is the new vision for the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. I look forward to partnering with you on collaborative efforts.
Vision
As one of Virginia Tech’s premier research initiatives, the Metropolitan Institute conducts basic and applied research on the dynamics of metropolitan complexities, such as demographics, environment, technology, design, transportation, and governance. With most of the globe’s population moving to urbanized areas, the major public policy challenges of this century will require a deeper understanding of how metropolitan complexities play out across multiple jurisdictions, locations, infrastructures, and stakeholders.
The Metropolitan Institute fosters research on designing, planning, and governing of livable, sustainable, and economically-viable urban spaces. Our research embraces the challenge of addressing the intertwining variables, goals, mechanisms, and systems of accountability within this space through an integration of heterogeneous information, emerging computational mechanics, and predictive theoretical frameworks. The Metropolitan Institute offers two special capabilities to help policymakers and practitioners address these emerging public policy challenges. Firstly, the Metropolitan Institute can visualize, analyze, interpret, and employ information from a wide assortment of sources, using sophisticated analytical approaches in a cost-effective manner as part of a new era of social science research that embraces policy informatics to solving complex problems. Secondly, the Metropolitan Institute provides an interdisciplinary platform for academic researchers from public policy, to geography and planning, from economics to computational sciences, and from architecture to engineering to advance the cause of designing, planning, and administering resilient and sustainable urban spaces.
Located in the National Capital Region in Alexandria, VA, the Metropolitan Institute is housed within the College of Architecture and Urban Studies (CAUS) where it can leverage key strengths of the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) faculty within the Departments of Urban and Regional Planning (UAP), Public Administration and Policy (CPAP), and Government and International Affairs (GIA), while also reaching beyond the boundaries of department, college, or university, to bring together the richest collaboration of thinkers to each research question. The Metropolitan Institute advances the mission of Virginia Tech by enabling policy makers, city planners, businesses, and citizens to invent the future of resilient and sustainable metropolitans.
