We will engage Houston as a focus and partner for research and education, leveraging our broad expertise on critical urban issues to be a driving force in enabling Houston’s success as a 21st-century metropolis.
Rice’s home city — with its coastal location, diverse population, industry, urban and suburban footprints, cultural institutions and world-class facilities — reflects both the challenges and opportunities of a 21st century city. Rice must engage fully with the city on both those challenges and opportunities. To that end, Rice should coordinate educational programs around urban issues and engage with Houston, both learning from it and contributing to it. Using its teaching and research capacity, Rice will participate with the city and key organizations and institutions as a strategic academic partner to collect and analyze data, engage in research on critical issues, and recommend policies and actions on major urban challenges, such as K–16 education, health care and coastal flooding. Rice must play a key role in enabling Houston to achieve its vision of being a leading hub for innovation and technology. We must leverage our Houston engagement and expertise to build relationships with other global cities and their universities to better understand and address common challenges.