The contemporary metropolis is an agglomeration of older and newer settlements, where cities and towns and areas of peripheral development have merged into multi-centred, highly interdependent constellations. Only at this regional or mega-city level can patterns of socio-economic welfare, transportation and its technology, knowledge and work, and the effects of global mobility and communications, be fully understood.

Yet modern urban regions are usually patchworks of municipal governments, generally in local economic competition with each other, but substantially lacking broad governance that could order and coordinate change and growth to regional benefit. Where regional government has been successfully instituted, it has eventually (at least in North America) been overwhelmed by the forces of development. Effective governance of contemporary urban regions depends on the willingness of governments above the municipal level that have constitutional, legal, and economic responsibilities for urban regions to intervene and govern them.

A corollary of this situation is a pervasive lack of understanding and, more fundamentally, of reliable, consistent, and comprehensive data on the condition and change of urban regions. This problem was particularly stark in the Toronto metropolitan region in the late 1990s, where provincial government faculties for researching the region had been substantially dismantled. This lacuna partly provoked the establishment of Neptis.

Neptis was established, therefore, to address issues of urban quality, change, and growth specifically at the trans-city, and in some circumstances, trans-national regional level. Its focus is regional information.