Our Work

From climate impacts to AI disruption to rapidly shifting demographics, the United States is undergoing major changes—the effects of which fall most heavily on our communities, their leaders, and their residents. Brookings Metro is helping communities across the country navigate these changes to become more resilient, inclusive, and prosperous. We’re doing so by advancing local solutions to create more well-paying jobs, uplift underserved populations, grow regional industries, make the most of new technology, build climate resilience, and revitalize public spaces.

Climate and the built environment 

As the impacts of climate change and extreme weather increase, Brookings Metro, as part of the Brookings Initiative on Climate Research and Action (BICRA), is committed to helping communities, their residents, and their infrastructure become more resilient in the face of disasters. We’re advancing climate-smart built environment strategies in transportation, water, and freight sectors, including how to train a green workforce for those jobs. We’re helping places weigh their exposure to climate risks, and identify tailored solutions to keep people and homes safe. And we’re finding ways that state and local leaders can develop and deploy new funding​ streams to build a clean economy. 

Demographic change 

The nation’s demographics are evolving, as chronicled by Senior Fellow Willian H. Frey, with persistent inequalities by race, ethnicity, and place. Our Center for Community Uplift scholars are examining the factors that increase well-being and economic mobility across all of the nation’s places and people. Our research evaluates how communities fare on measures of health and wealth across different populations, while other analyses drill down on opportunities and challenges for wealth-building and entrepreneurship for Black and Latino or Hispanic Americans. We’re also highlighting issues facing the Native American community in areas such as education and data availability.

Future-ready workforce

Our education and training systems weren’t built for today’s rapidly changing economy, in which AI, demographic shifts, and global disruptions are reshaping work itself. Brookings Metro is advancing research on human-centered workforce development, youth mobility and career development, apprenticeship expansion, and skills-first hiring to connect more people with quality jobs. In addition, our scholars are helping leaders build the infrastructure workforce needed to leverage historic federal investments and create stronger pathways to economic opportunity in an evolving economy.

Place-based economic development

The last few years saw the federal government make historic, billion-dollar investments in the nation’s infrastructure, manufacturing, and advanced industries. These “place-based” strategies targeted specific geographies and populations that had been left out of previous waves of growth. Brookings Metro has been helping leaders in those communities make the most of those investments—and garner further support—through targeted network engagements.

Technological transformation

The rapid adoption of advanced artificial intelligence and large language models such as ChatGPT have upended many sectors of the economy, with potentially devastating impacts for workers. Along with the institution’s broader Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative (AIET), Brookings Metro is exploring how AI may alter the American workforce for good or ill, including by highlighting which jobs are most susceptible to the technology and benchmarking regions’ readiness for AI adoption as a source of growth.

Transformative placemaking

Investing in place-based assets for residents and businesses is key to growing safe, healthy communities and generating widespread social and economic well-being. At Brookings Metro, we’re helping local leaders realize the benefits of “transformative placemaking” through community-centered economic inclusion; community safety investments to address crime and homelessness; downtown revitalization, including through office-to-residential conversions; wealth-building via community ownership of real estate; innovative place governance; and many more ways that advance inclusive development across America’s cities, suburbs, and rural areas.