About the Metropolitan Policy Program
Created in 1996, the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program provides decision makers with timely trend analysis, cutting-edge research and policy ideas for improving the health and prosperity of cities and metropolitan areas.
The program is based on a simple premise: The United States is a metropolitan nation. Metropolitan areas are home to 83 percent of the U.S. population, 85 percent of the nation’s jobs and 92 percent of all college graduates. They are our hubs of research and innovation, our centers of human capital, and our gateways of trade and immigration. They are, in short, the drivers of our economy, and American competitiveness depends on their vitality.
Our work is designed to help metropolitan areas (and the cities and suburbs within them) adapt to rapid economic, demographic, and technological changes and ultimately achieve three goals that are central for success in the new global order:
- Productive growth that boosts innovation and entrepreneurship, generates quality jobs and rising incomes, and helps the U.S. maintain its economic leadership;
- Inclusive growth that expands educational and employment opportunities, reduces poverty, and fosters a strong and diverse middle class; and
- Sustainable growth that strengthens existing cities and communities, conserves fiscal and natural resources, and advances U.S. efforts to address climate change and achieve energy independence.
To help metro areas, and thereby the nation, prosper, the Metro program focuses on leveraging the unique roles of federal, state and local actors, with the private sector. Our work is also increasingly informed by lessons learned from metro areas and nations abroad.
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Understanding a Changing Nation The Metro Program consistently chronicles the dynamic demographic, economic, social, and cultural forces sweeping the country and interprets what these forces means for cities and metropolitan areas. Our aim is to unveil the new spatial geography of work and opportunity in the U.S. and identify the new sets of challenges and opportunities (e.g., increased suburban poverty, downtown resurgence, declining older suburbs) that have arisen.
Setting the National Agenda In advance of the 2008 presidential election, the Metro Program developed the “
Blueprint for American Prosperity,” a federal roadmap for unleashing the full economic and fiscal potential of our metropolitan areas and helping them grow in sustainable and inclusive ways. The Blueprint asserts that the nation’s ability to maintain its economic pre-eminence and meet the social and environmental challenges of our time will depend heavily on the ability of our top metropolitan areas to grow in healthy and vital ways. Thus, the United States needs a new generation of federal policies which “bubble up” from and build upon the expertise and proven innovations of metropolitan America.
The
Blueprint has four signature elements:
An initial economy-framing paper, entitled Metros Matter: The Foundation for Strengthening U.S. Economic Prosperity, will demonstrate the primacy of America’s top 100 metropolitan areas in American economic life, demonstrate that these places are the driving engines of national prosperity, and discuss the policy implications of the global trend towards the agglomeration of workers and firms in large metropolitan places.
An initial policy-framing paper, entitled Unleashing America’s Metropolitan Potential: A New Federal-Metro Partnership for Prosperity, will present a bold new paradigm for federal reform to better empower metropolitan areas to adapt to change and innovate in order to increase the nation’s prosperity. This paper will describe the complicating, and often detrimental, effects of an outmoded federal-state policy structure that fails to enable cities and metropolitan areas to adapt to changing economic realities.
A series of Blueprint Policy Briefs will argue for specific, “legislatable” reforms in selected areas of federal policy including advanced research and innovation, regional economic development, transportation, energy efficiency, rental housing, higher education, and urban school reform.
Two major regional papers will identify how the federal government can help metro areas and states in the fast growing Intermountain West and the slow growing Great Lakes adapt to distinct economic, social, and environmental challenges.
The Blueprint was prepared in close collaboration with a new Metropolitan Leadership Council, a bipartisan network of individual, corporate, and foundation investors from a representative set of metropolitan areas. In addition, the Metro Program is working closely with a growing network of metropolitan partners including local elected officials, university leaders, and metropolitan business alliances.
Learning from Abroad A globalizing world, particularly one that is rapidly urbanizing, requires the United States to learn from the best policy innovations abroad. To that end, the Metro Program has launched an intensive collaboration with the London School of Economics to discover policy lessons from both economically recovering cities in Europe as well as fast growing cities in the developing world. This collaboration is already yielding important transferable insights on transportation, environmental remediation, and metropolitan governance.
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