FC / NETWORK
Registry 01 · Domain
Urban Futures
Seventy-five years of patient work, and a door held open for you.
Municipal-scale adaptation when migration outpaces planning.
Classification
Research domain
Cross-disciplinary index
Brief / 01
Context record
Urban-futures research at RAND treats cities as adaptive systems under accelerating climate, demographic, and economic stress, the central question is what municipal-scale governance can credibly do when migration outpaces planning.
Through work with cities, regional planning bodies, and federal partners, RAND researchers have produced sustained work on coastal megacity adaptation, urban mobility, infrastructure investment, and the long-horizon planning conditions facing cities under climate stress.
RAND's Signature Themes in Urban Futures
Coastal megacity adaptation
Planning under sea-level rise and storm-surge regimes that exceed historical reference points.
Urban mobility and transport futures
How autonomous vehicles, electrification, and shifting work patterns reshape urban transportation systems.
Infrastructure investment under uncertainty
Long-lived infrastructure decisions under climate, demographic, and technology uncertainty.
Municipal climate finance
How cities pay for adaptation at the scale and speed that conditions now require.
Representative Work
Coastal Master Plan Analysis
RAND · Louisiana CPRA
Not Everything is Broken: The Future of U.S. Transportation
RAND · RR-A1530-1
Infrastructure Investment and the Federal Budget
RAND · ongoing
Methodological Emphasis
Robust decision making, exploratory modeling, and mixed-methods regional case research.
Methodological Lineage →Affiliated Researchers