Thomas M. Menino, who led the city of Boston through a generation of economic transformation and changing demographics as its mayor from 1993 to 2014, passed away Thursday morning after a lengthy battle with cancer.

The 71-year-old Hyde Park native announced last week that he was ending his cancer treatments and would spend his remaining time with his family. Menino decided not to seek reelection in 2013 after serving for five consecutive terms.

"With sheer determination and unmatched work ethic, he took a city that is not as big in size as we are in stature and put us on the world stage as a national leader in health care, education, innovation and the nitty-gritty of executing basic city services," Mayor Martin Walsh said in a statement today.

Menino described himself as an "urban mechanic" and drew criticism early in his tenure for focusing on nuts-and-bolts issues while neglecting larger visions of the city’s future. Those visions started to materialize in recent years, most notably his long-running fascination with the South Boston waterfront as one of the city’s last economic frontiers.

In 2010, amid widespread skepticism, he laid out his vision for turning 1,000 acres of rundown industrial real estate into an "Innovation District" for high-tech startups. By the time Menino left office in 2014, approximately 200 companies employing 5,000 people had moved to the waterfront, from law firms and venture capital firms to software companies and architects.

Menino based his vision for the Seaport on similar innovation districts in cities such as Barcelona, Spain. Real estate sources said Boston’s experiment got a major boost when Menino urged his long-time friend, developer Joseph Fallon, to offer the MassChallenge tech incubator free workspace in his One Marine Park Drive office tower on the Fan Pier. The organization relocated from Cambridge and has helped hundreds of tech ventures enter the market, many of which have set up permanent space in South Boston.

But skeptics argued that Boston rebounded from the recession faster than most cities because of the strength of its higher education and life science industries, rather than political initiatives.

The economic revival brought with it disruption to neighborhoods as middle-class housing became scarcer, a problem that Menino sought to address late in his career with a plan to build 30,000 new units of housing in the city before 2020. Some elements of the plan have been embraced by his successor as the shortage of workforce housing has intensified.

On the development front, Menino was notorious for his hands-on approach to reviewing details of major projects and drew criticism for playing favorites and using his clout to influence the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the city’s permitting agency. His approach kindled feuds with those who didn’t get what they wanted, but few dared to publicly question Menino’s influence. One of those who did, Boston developer Donald Chiofaro, saw his plans for a pair of waterfront skyscrapers languish after he denounced the city’s review process. Menino also fought New England Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft’s attempts to build a stadium on the South Boston waterfront. He was similarly quick to criticize the developers of the former Filene’s site in Downtown Crossing for failing to move forward with a $700-million mixed-use development, leaving a vacant lot in one of the city’s signature neighborhoods.

At the same time, Menino was a strong proponent of the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center project, which opened in 2004 and attracts hundreds of trade shows and conventions annually.

Menino made no apologies for his willingness to flex the powers of the mayor’s office to advance his agenda.

"Fear is power. I owed it to my city to keep fear alive," he wrote in his recently-published autobiography, "Mayor For a New America."

Menino was credited with embracing reforms, after some early hesitancy, that helped improve Boston’s troubled public school system and put him at odds with the city’s teachers unions. After initially opposing charter schools, Menino in 2009 supported lifting the cap on charter schools within the city’s limits. During his tenure, three new schools were built and 11 others were renovated. He sponsored a summer jobs program for teens that gave them a foot in the door at some of the city’s major corporations.

Born in Hyde Park, Menino attended St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Jamaica Plain and took a job selling life insurance after graduation. He got his start in politics in 1983 as a district city councilor representing Hyde Park. In 1993, when President Clinton appointed then-Mayor Raymond Flynn as the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Menino became the acting mayor. He defeated state Rep. James Brett in 1994 and was never seriously challenged in the ensuing years, running unopposed in 1997 and winning by lopsided margins over challengers Peggy Davis-Mullen, Maura Hennigan and Michael Flaherty. His 57- to 42-percent margin over Flaherty was the closest of the races.