This general objective is complemented by eight specific objectives:

1. Identify and evaluate changes related to economic and social restructuring processes.
2. Develop critical thinking about spatial organization.
3. Formulate diagnoses at European and national levels portraying economic, social, and territorial trends.
4. Elaborate studies, plans, and programs of territorial and urban planning, including: city policies and sustainable urban development, through sub-themes such as mobility, healthy communities and cities, urban regeneration, public space; organization of urban systems and their respective territorial organization models; land use patterns with recent evolution towards ecosystem services, highlighting the agro-systems component.
5. Discuss and evaluate cohesion policy, territorial cooperation, and European territorial planning policy.
6. Analyse human and social vulnerabilities, including gender and health studies, in various aspects, including equity studies in access to health, aging, health determinants in urban contexts, and effects on physical and mental health, as well as a recent aspect linked to COVID-19.
7. Develop methods and techniques to support decision-making in regional and urban planning, geostatistics, GIS, programming, databases, and related areas.
8. Elaborate scenarios of sustainable territorial development, from an intersectoral and interdisciplinary perspective.

These specific objectives are executed within three different approaches: theoretical development, methodological development, and analysis of applied innovation.

MOPT focuses on different domains of knowledge: geography, urban and regional studies, territorial planning, energy and environmental security, geopolitics and natural resources, modelling and GIS, European policies, cohesion and territorial cooperation policies, epidemiology, transportation and mobility, gender and social justice, resilience of urban systems, social and environmental vulnerability, sustainable urban forms, urban metabolism, agro-systems in urban environments, and sustainable and healthy communities.