Overview

The MetroLab is a metropolitan Think Tank and consulting service for the integrated urban development of metropolitan areas and city regions. It introduces participative, integrative and creative-artistic elements and develops innovative metropolitan strategies as well as place-based solutions. Based on a co-creative and dialogue-oriented planning and design approach it fosters not only placemaking interventions, but also the transfer of cutting-edge knowledge in creative urban planning and bureaucracy. Facing the immensity of contemporary urban challenges, the MetroLab works with an elaborated toolbox which qualifies successful instruments of metropolitan planning and makes them applicable for different metropolitan development areas. Our team consists of the partnering offices Superwien urbanism and CoCo architecture. The joint MetoLab office in Vienna was founded in early 2020 and is supported by the Vienna Business Agency. Our methodology is rooted in two previous research projects: The "Urban Design Lab" proposing a dialogue-oriented methodology for the development of integrated urban strategies for emerging cities and the "SuperWien Metropole", a project envisioning the city-region Vienna–Bratislava–Wiener Neustadt as a new capital for Europe by understanding it as a testing ground for fresh ideas in metropolitan planning. Our clients are cities, municipalities of metropolitan areas, regional governments and/or multilateral organizations such as development agencies or the branches from United Nations, World Bank Group, Inter-American Development Bank, among others. Among our services are: • the moderation of complex planning processes bringing together a myriad of stakeholders of the public and private sector, • the curatorship of a dialogue between those stakeholders, including design-oriented artistic interventions, • the development of strategies, visions, plans, etc. in a creative project environment, • as well as their management and implementation