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Cities are by their very nature under continuous cycles of urban transformations. Yet, there are a few instances in the history of a city that the drive producing these transformations is accelerated by a cultural momentum that can become tremendously innovative. Such occurrences often signal a new period of civic consciousness contributing toward the creation of a better quality of urban living.
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Metropolitan Design Center’s Mission
Since its founding in 1988 with a grant from the Dayton Hudson Foundation, the Metropolitan Design Center (MDC) has explored how an integrated urban design approach can help in making metropolitan communities more livable and sustainable. Today, the MDC’s teaching, research and outreach programs bring university faculty and graduate students to participate in critical design and research investigations using the Twin Cities metropolitan area as a laboratory of investigations around issues that make livable and sustainable cities possible.Today, cities and, perhaps more precisely, cities and their specific regions are being rediscovered as magnets of creative energy and innovation. What is valuable to mention is that these city-regions have been able to create new and distinctive growth economies and lifestyles based on the ability to weave their reconstruction efforts, mixing together the physical with the cultural — an essential integration, shaped by the physiographic characteristics of each specific region. As a result, a distinctive attribute of successful cities and regions emerges based on the ability to manage change over time, becoming a magnet for attracting talent and entrepreneurship, providing a quality-of-life that values the regional ecology and the role of the arts as agents to reinforce local place and identity, and develop a system of well informed decision-making that is built from a vibrant public vision for the future. To achieve this complex and multifaceted vision, government officials and city planning agencies are looking for new collaborative partnerships involving civic organizations and academic institutions that function outside electoral politics in an effort to expand the dialogue, find new solutions, re-assess old questions, and be better informed with respect to discovering suitable alternatives to help achieve a positive growth and development directions. To this aim, the Metropolitan Design Center has positioned itself to act in such a leadership role coordinating multidisciplinary teams to answer some of the challenges that are confronting cities and metropolitan regions in the 21st century.
