Mary Taws interned with The Agenda for six weeks this fall and helped produce this interview with Clare O'Neill. This is her blogpost on tonight's feature interview:

It’s a common tale for urban centres of the 21st century: the outgrowth of initial structure.

And I mean structure in every sense of the word: economic, social, political, and physical structure. It may mean rethinking the way that a city has always been. In the case of Manchester it meant rethinking the traditional emphasis on the industrial sector. Reinventing a city means asking tough, seemingly impossible questions.

What’s the first step in reinventing a city, and in turn, its reputation? Tonight’s interview with Clare O’Neill of networking group, Manchester Knowledge Capital, a partnership of Greater Manchester’s universities, local authorities, public agencies and leading businesses, explores some of these challenges that exist for the Greater Manchester region.

But the problem of outgrowing a traditional structure is not only an issue for formerly industrial heavy cities. It’s a challenge for cities worldwide.

One example that immediately came to mind is the renewal of Bogota, the capital of Columbia.  Former mayor Enrique Peñalosa stopped by The Agenda in late October to discuss the city’s renewal.

While Manchester and Bogota face drastically different challenges, they are united in the fact that the model they had just wasn’t working. Peñalosa summed up this disconnect using the example of transit. “Cities are made for cars and not people,” as he concisely put it. In other words, the ways our cities are constructed is not a reflection of how we are operating today. And that’s what Manchester Knowledge Capital strives to address.

In order to make a city functional in the present day, the people need to stay current and engaged. It means more than waiting for the improvements from think tanks and governmental policy to trickle down. It means being engaged at a citizen level.

I came across this DIY City blog that unites urbanites the world over. It’s a place of idea building and sharing to innovate technology in the 21st century. Below is a list of blog challenges that use technology as a catalyst for city improvement:
•    Build a Twitter bot that helps users avoid traffic and get where they're going faster.
•    Create an app that promotes bike riding in the city somehow: makes it easier to get from point A to point B, makes it less stressful, simpler.
•    Design an app that works as an early warning system for outbreaks of flu, colds and other communicable disease at the city level.

Perhaps networking and new technologies like the above DIY City Challenges are necessary to reinvent our cities, but are they at all sufficient? Please share your thoughts of what measures need to be taken to reinvent your city.