More Dallas than Corrie

The regeneration of East Manchester took an international sporting event to kickstart it, but it has now reached tipping point.

The story of Manchester is a soap opera, with the kind of greed, extravagance and gravitas fit for a Texas oil baron ('there will be blood' as the luckless crowds of 'Peterloo' discovered); on the flipside it's given birth to social reformers, agitators, philanthropists, musicians, and so much more... until the mind cracks under the strain of trying to encapsulate the sheer breadth of Manchester's history in one mere paragraph.

On the one hand, it gave the world the Manchester School of liassezfaire economics. Today, reborn under the banner of what political commentators call neo-liberalism, the ideological window dressing of the modern globalised economy that Britain – and Manchester – pioneered to the world, whether it wanted it or not, back in the heady days of the Industrial Revolution and Empire.

On the flipside, the city nurtured an economic philosophy and ideology utterly opposed to everything Manchester stood for both past and present. The scion of a textile magnate, one Frederick Engels, was so outraged by the excesses of grinding poverty masked behind the grandiose architecture and profound wealth of his city, that he became the second half to one Karl Marx – and so was spawned communism.

In a roundabout way, that brings affairs back to the 'two cities' conundrum that Manchester faces in its 21st Century incarnation. Last year, the former Conservative Party leader, Iain Duncan Smith unveiled the Centre for Social Justice's report into Manchester.

The report was an indictment that alongside the obvious affluence and vibrancy that regeneration has created in the city, many were being left behind to poverty, social exclusion, crime and family breakdown: a division of almost Dickensian proportions.

This issue of two cities isn't just a haunting legacy of Old Manchester and its decline: it's a pressing issue for the city's present and its future as it continues to reinvent itself. The revitalisation needs a sound foundation, socially as well as economically and the two intertwine – which is surely what the concept of the 'sustainable community' is all about.

Over the last ten years, Manchester has made itself a frontrunner in the regeneration arena, facing the hard slog of putting theory – and often rhetoric – into practice. The result has been the transformation of the city centre, with its striking new buildings such as Urbis or the Beetham Tower, not to mention the renovation of its grandiose old buildings, be they industrial, commercial, or civic, to create – for the most part – the (almost) seamless union of 'legacy and contemporary' that is New Manchester.

Easy enough in the city centre, perhaps, but it's out in the hinterlands where the regeneration game meets the real challenge – for it's here where the two cities meet and the one must accommodate the other or risk a metaphorical Peterloo II.

New East Manchester (NEM) was the quango tasked to meet this challenge in the city's eastern districts. Established in 1999, it was one of the earliest urban regeneration companies to be formed in the wake of Lord Roger's Urban Task Force report published the previous year.

The organisation is a partnership between the city council, English Partnerships and the North West Development Agency; as the council's process of divesting its housing stock to either ALMOs or LSVT housing associations, so these have plugged into the partnership to play their part

in transforming the neighbourhoods and districts that fall under NEM's operational jurisdiction.

There are other players to, from private sector developers to regeneration partnerships and further agencies such as New Deal for Communities. Here, local government meets national government, meets Europe, and the public gets into bed with the private in the pursuit of overturning decades of economic decay and its resulting social and damage.

the remit is simple; that is to take the lead at the strategic level to foster the physical regeneration of the area, co-ordinate and integrate the social with the economic, to boost the local market in an effort to nurture new business and attract outside investors, to provide jobs and opportunities. If the task is deceptively simple, there is nothing deceptive about the scale, which NEM itself has called "formidable".

East Manchester occupies an area of some 1,100 hectares beginning immediately east of the city centre, taking in Ancoats, Cardroom, Miles Platting, Newton Heath, Beswick, Clayton, and Openshaw. Here was Manchester's engine room, when it was one of the main industrial and economic powerhouses of Britain.

The full range of activities and projects underway to restore the area, either complete, in process or in the pipeline, is staggering, and while there is a long way to go to complete the area's resurrection, it has arrested the decline that began in the 1970s with the onset of the collapse of the UK's traditional manufacturing base.

Already some high profile developments have been successfully completed and the slow depopulation of the area, as those who could afford to move away did so, has been reversed.

New homes have been created, and thousands more refurbished, town centre regeneration programmes have brought in high profile retailers, resulting in the creation of jobs, infrastructure has been improved, and the impact has been to reverse a historic collapse in house prices.

And the process continues. At the beginning of the year, the city council approved plans for the largest regeneration scheme ever undertaken in the city.

Over the next decade, the Holt City Waterfront development, adjacent to the Sportscity development where the 2002 Commonwealth Games were held, will see some 4,300 new homes built. Most of these will be aimed at families.

Securing a good home environment for the kids – surely that's what the future is all about? And breathing life back into East Manchester's old industrial heartlands is what NEM is all about, at least on paper, to ensure this future is realised.