  With the start of the Gaia era, the time has come to address the major
challenge of deriving the star formation history and evolution of the disk of
our MilkyWay. Here we review our present knowledge of the outer regions of the
Milky Way disk population. Its stellar content, its structure and its dynamical
and chemical evolution are summarized, focussing on our lack of understanding
both from an observational and a theoretical viewpoint. We describe the
unprecedented data that Gaia and the upcoming ground-based spectroscopic
surveys will provide in the next decade. More in detail, we quantify the expect
accuracy in position, velocity and astrophysical parameters of some of the key
tracers of the stellar populations in the outer Galactic disk. Some insights on
the future capability of these surveys to answer crucial and fundamental issues
are discussed, such as the mechanisms driving the spiral arms and the warp
formation. Our Galaxy, theMilkyWay, is our cosmological laboratory for
understanding the process of formation and evolution of disk galaxies. What we
learn in the next decades will be naturally transferred to the extragalactic
domain.
