Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Aaron M. Renn speaks about the process of revitalizing cities, with a focus on St. Louis. His focus will be the role of start-ups and entrepreneurship in revitalizing cities and the importance of including and empowering multiple groups of stakeholders: business leaders and entrepreneurs, policymakers and urban planners, and the surrounding community.

About the Speaker

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. His perspectives on urban issues are regularly cited in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, The Economist, Daily Telegraph, and other international media. He blogs at the Urbanophile. 

Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991. He has created several widely used open-source software packages, including the only program for recovering data from corrupted gzip backups. In 1998, Renn launched one of the nation’s first blogs, the Weekly Breakdown, to cover the Chicago Transit Authority.