The Johns Hopkins Center for Urban Affairs was founded in 1969 as a University-wide interdisciplinary research center with a major grant from the Ford Foundation. Administratively a part of the School of Hygiene and Public Health and located on the University's East Baltimore campus, the center was created to serve as a catalyst for the promotion of research in urban studies by Hopkins faculty and students. It did not offer any degree program, although faculty associated with the center did teach courses both at Hygiene and in the School of Arts and Sciences.

In 1972, the resignation of center co-director Sol Levine to accept a post at Boston University gave Hopkins officials an opportunity to reorganize the center. Professor Jack C. Fisher, associate director of the Center for Urban Studies at Wayne State University, was brought in to be the center's new director, and it was renamed, becoming the Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research. Finally, the center was moved to the Homewood campus, and placed in the School of Arts and Sciences, in order to aid in cooperation with the University's social science departments.

Fisher brought two major programs with him from Wayne State. One, the International Urban Fellows Program, brought urban planners from Europe to the United States for a year of study and research. The other, the American-Yugoslav Planning Project, was the result of a cooperative venture by Fisher and the planners at the Urban Institute in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. This program was responsible for a number of studies of the application of Western planning methods in a communist country, and its move to Hopkins was the beginning of the University's long involvement with Eastern Europe in general, and Yugoslavia in particular.

In an attempt to get the center more involved in the Baltimore community, the Policy Committee of the Metro Center was formed in 1973. Composed of concerned community leaders, scholars in the field of urban planning and Hopkins faculty members, the committee was organized to give general guidance to the center, suggesting areas of research, and attempting to interpret the center's findings from the perspective of its members. In order to work more effectively, the committee divided itself into subcommittees and task forces, specializing in such areas as housing, health care and minority economic development.

The center strengthened its European ties even more in 1983, when it opened an overseas branch in Lille, France. Directed by John W. Dyckman, a longtime friend of Fisher's and former member of the center's Baltimore staff, the Lille center shares facilities with the University of Lille, and is devoted to research into the transformation of local economies from dependence on heavy industry to reliance on high technology manufacturing.