The Project on the City, an undertaking which researches the effects of modernization on the contemporary city, was founded upon the realization of a double crisis. The first is the academic and professional bewilderment with urban conditions that seem to defy traditional description: specifically, new forms of accelerated urbanization in developing regions of the world and the maelstrom of redevelopment in existing urban areas. The second crisis is the failure of the design professions to adequately cope with these changes. As cities modernize beyond professional control, no longer is the architect/urbanist/landscape architect able to sufficiently describe, let alone influence, large areas of the urban realm as even in the recent past. This double condition of runaway development and disciplinary paralysis warrants the urgent need to study the evolving agents, relationships and consequences of contemporary urbanization.

At the start of each year, Koolhaas proposes a topic to be researched by eight to fourteen GSD thesis students from all three of the school's disciplines. In the first semester, Koolhaas and the students collectively travel and conduct research; in the second, the students work independently to develop individual lines of inquiries.

From January 1996 to January 1997, the focus was China's Pearl River Delta, a site of extremely rapid urbanization. New urban conditions stemming from the forces that shape cities (money, politics, ideology, etc.) and new building (architecture, landscape, infrastructure, etc.) were researched and polemically defined. Their studies of Shenzhen, Dongguan, Guangzhou, Zhuhai, Macao, and Hong Kong were published in the "Documenta X" catalog following the exhibition in Kassel, Germany. According to Koolhaas, in an interview published in The Critical Landscape (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1996), "The thesis is that the entire area will become a new urban entity but that its unity is premised on constant exaggeration of the differences between each element."

From January 1997 to January 1998, the research focused on shopping and the influence of shopping environments on urbanization in Asia, Europe, and the United States. Students catalogued the different realities created by, among other things, marketing strategies, new retail technologies and hybrid combinations of building programs (cultural, entertainment, recreational, and retail) - speculating on the terminal consequences the concepts and spaces of shopping have on the city and the design professions.

Since 1998 the Project on the City has been involved in two concurrent studies: Roman Cities, and West African urbanization. Roman Cities examines ancient Roman techniques of conquest, adaptation and assimilation. Idealized concepts of the Roman urban environment (monumentality, 'Architecture,' planification, axiality, etc.) are being re-assessed in an effort to identify an alternative dominant model of urban growth present in the Empire. Protocols, or 'softwares' of urban and regional settlement, are being studied as possible precursors of modern urbanization.

West African Urbanization is a study of the paradigmatic globalizing qualities of Lagos and Abuja. It documents the advanced organizational forms of dispersal, flexibility and reclamation present in West Africa today, demonstrating that Lagos 'functions' in a more efficient way than so-called contemporary cities like Los Angeles, Houston, Tokyo and London.