We Are All City Makers
The Imagine Cities White Paper
Synopsis
Quality of life in cities is underpinned by economic development, which makes cities inherently competitive. They compete for talent and businesses, particularly talent trained in advanced skillsets. Talent tends to gravitate to cities that provide economic opportunity and a great lifestyle. Cities that were ranked the highest excelled in offering both economic opportunity and appealing lifestyles.
Great cities don’t pop up out of nowhere. When you consider what it takes to build great cities, all roads lead to the makeup of neighbourhoods. To offer economic opportunity and an appealing lifestyle to the talent a city has attracted and want to keep, cities should increasingly be focused on improving the quality of their neighbourhoods.
When considering how to improve cities, we must admit that the process to better is not linear. Rather the process is dynamic and, as a result, is also are also inherently complex. To make better decisions, high performing cities are turning to research and data to better understand the complexity that exists to make decisions that are more impactful using finite resources. These decisions optimize the use of resources to improve life for residents. This provides decision makers with an edge when compared to other cities who are not making data informed decisions.
With the emergence of exponential thinking and disruptive innovation, city makers no longer have decades to identify and respond to changes in their urban systems to maintain and improve the quality of life of residents. To adapt to this new era, we will not only need scientists, engineers, and designers. We will need a growing community of creative problem solvers across society, including in our neighbourhoods.
In 2017, the World Economic Forum prepared a report which stated that governments cannot deliver on all of the demands needed for increasingly competitive cities. A 2019 Boston Consulting Group report found that while cities are full of people overflowing with creativity and innovation, the ability to innovate to solve urban problems had long been siloed within the hands of the few. The deep complexities and dynamism of cities has long demanded an integrated approach that involves neighbourhood leaders, the nonprofit sector, the public sector, and private enterprise.
Imagine Cities was born out of the idea that we need to create new capabilities to strengthen our capacity to respond to a more dynamic rather than linear world which calls for cross sectoral partnerships to improve outcomes in cities, most importantly the residents of its many neighbourhoods. Working across sectors, our digital tools, including our search engine (which is supporting by our research categories), learning guides, adaptable neighbourhood leadership certificate, and Lab, enable our Ecosystem of Adaptation to create the environment necessary for cities to more effectively adapt to a complex and ever changing system.
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Full text
According to the Global Cities Index, over half of the world’s population lives in cities. The United Nations expect that by 2050, two thirds of the world’s population (6.8 billion of 9 billion people) will live in and around cities. The importance of cities has grown to such an extent that they have become centres for global markets, higher education, culture, and innovation with two leading cities, Singapore and formerly Hong Kong operating outside the jurisdiction of a national government. The World Bank estimates that 80% of all economic activity today is generated in cities, and that is expected to increase.
As the centre of global growth shifts towards Asia, Africa, and South America, it’s expected that one out of three cities in the developed world will drop out of the top 600 urban economies. At the same time, 136 new cities will enter the fold. Consider this: Shenzhen was a fishing village in 1980 but now produces the third highest GDP in China, and the African continent is home to several of the fastest growing economies in the world. This eastern and southern shift in economic power is resulting in significant disruption and rising competition. This disruption has led cities to engage in better decision-making processes to find the insight needed to more effectively use their finite resources to produce more robust outcomes which will propel their competitiveness.
Competitive Cities
The quality of a city are underpinned by it’s ability to provide opportunities to its residents through economic development. According to UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, for every graduate that takes up innovative-centric employment, five jobs in other industries are created (e.g. teachers, waiters, trades, etc.).
It was in 2014 when Harvard economist Edward Glaeser stated, “the most successful economic development policy is to attract and retain smart people and then get out of their way.” According to Glaeser, in order for cities to compete, they need to attract people while not becoming an impediment to turning ideas into reality. According to a City Observatory report, cities that are able to attract and retain talent are also the cities successful businesses are choosing to set up operations.
A 2009 International Regions Benchmarking Consortium report outlined how cities can attract and retain talent. The study showed that graduates tend to choose a city based on economic opportunity and lifestyle. Cities that were ranked the highest excelled in offering both economic opportunity and appealing lifestyles. Due to companies increasingly choosing to locate where graduates are choosing to live, quality of life and economic opportunity exist within a symbiotic relationship.
Great cities are born out of thriving neighbourhoods
Great cities don’t pop up out of nowhere. When you consider what it takes to build great cities, all roads lead to the neighbourhoods. The people who make a city great reside in the neighbourhoods that make up a city, including the talent that create economic opportunity. Consider the need for density to improve local economic development, a public transit initiative to reduce congestion, or a proposal to build a new research hub to improve industrial economic growth, these are all built in and run through neighbourhoods.
In their San Francisco Federal Reserve report, Shirley Franklin and David Edwards highlight that:
“The health of a city is inextricably linked to health of it’s neighbourhoods..A vibrant and prosperous future for our cities can be created, but it needs to be created one neighbourhood at a time.”
Raj Chetty builds an even stronger case of our need to focus on the quality of our neighbourhoods:
“Every year you spend in a better [neighbourhood] makes you more likely to go to college, less likely to have teenage pregnancy, makes you earn more as an adult, makes you more likely to have a stable family situation…in so many dimensions, you see substantial improvements.”
Understanding complex systems
Cities, and the neighbourhoods that exist within them, are not like machines that are built with liner and programmable outcomes: if you do x, then you get y. Instead, cities are webs of complex systems that are relentlessly changing. Consider how our bodies react to a virus. When a virus is detected, a complex set of systems is automatically engaged. Even after the virus is gone, our body will never be the same. In good and bad ways, it has changed forever and it will never go back to what it once was.
Cities are no different. When an external force enters an urban system, such as self-driving cars or a new housing policy, it automatically triggers a chain reaction within the system that produces predictable and unpredictable, as well as visible and invisible, outcomes. Much like the world’s best doctors who are tirelessly exploring our complex biological systems to provide better treatments, city makers are also producing and scouring research to improve their ability to effectively respond to complex urban systems to improve lives.
Data — quality or quantity? We need both.
We exist in one of the most technologically revolutionary moments in human history where the rate of change is reaching mindboggling speed. In its 2016 report, Innosight stated that while the lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 in 1965 lasted about 35 years, they expect half of the S&P to be replaced over the next 10. Corporate longevity has shrunk significantly.
For the biggest companies on the stock exchange, data is at the centre of how they keep up and surpass their competition. The unique insights they can find in their data creates a competitive edge. A lack of quality information could lead to bad decisions potentially resulting in the company filing for bankruptcy. Quality research enables these companies to stay ahead of their competition and avoid disruptions.
The rise and fall of Nokia’s mobile phone brings to light the challenges posed by this new industrial period. In 2007, Nokia was a dominant player in the mobile phone industry, earning more than 50% of the profits across the industry. By September 2013, it had sold its handset business for $7.2 billion to Microsoft, a fifth of what its market cap was in 2007.
Similar to technology, healthcare also went through a revolution through the use of data and scientific methodologies. Toothaches used to be treated with cocaine, pain with heroin, and for 3,000 years bloodletting was believed to cure many ailments. Increased access to research, data, and commitment to scientific approaches led to identifying more significant insights that has significantly improved health outcomes. Like technology and healthcare, the ability to access quality information rooted in scientific approaches empowers cities, and the neighbourhoods that exist within them, with the ability to make decisions that produce more robust outcomes.
Cities have come a long way since Jane Jacobs first published the Life and Death of Great American Cities. Her ability to contextualize urban issues that were once easily misunderstood into significant forces shaping our economy, society, and environment, was second to none. Later generations have since turned her observations into a scientific study. This new age of scientific urbanism has led us to better understand how green space can improve our mental health, the significant toll that long commuting times can take on our physical health, the role of quality neighbourhoods in improving economic mobility, and how buildings can positively influence the way we feel, think, and even spend. As this body of research grows, so too does our ability to make better decisions — decisions that are rooted in evidence leading to better outcomes.
Technology and the future of cities
It’s not a coincidence that this new age of urbanism has also coincided with the rise of technology. Take, for example, South Korea’s ubiquitous cities program. The program is part of South Korea’s effort to seamlessly weave digital technologies into its urban systems and the everyday life of its metropolitan inhabitants. It’s estimated that there’s currently over 50 billion connected devices globally, including smart metres that collect real-time energy data, street lamps that adapt to movement, mobile phones that detect air and water quality, as well as connected cars that can communicate and sense the environment around them. These digital technologies are expected to produce 175 zettabytes annually by 2025. To put this into perspective, an iPhone can store 32 gigabytes. One zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. Access to these large datasets will empower residents and city builders to better understand the forces that are shaping cities, often in real time. This data is not only empowering decision makers to more effectively use finite resources to produce more robust outcomes, but it’s also optimizing resources that have already been allocated.
Here’s an example of how data can be used to gain insight, and from that insight, give users the ability to solve meaningful problems. In 2009, Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Senseable City Lab went to Seattle and tracked the garbage of residents through the city’s waste management system. Residents went to a location where their garbage was tagged with sensors and put into the waste management system. The experiment measured the level of inefficiency in Seattle’s waste management systems, and that information was used to improve decision making and the allocation of resources to make improvements.
In Canada, the impact of an inefficient waste management system was in the public eye with the 2019 dispute with the Philippines. We also saw it in the global disorientation stemming from China’s 2017 decision to no longer accept recyclables. While the impact of these decisions were very impactful, it’s also created significant opportunities for those who are audacious enough to think they can solve these shifting circumstances. In recent years, creative entrepreneurs have produced entirely new industries rooted in the circular economy and along with it a rising number of material science companies, including Allbirds, a shoe company valued at $1.4 billion, have flourished. Much like the founders of Allbirds these creative entrepreneurs, cities that can access a wide range of good, timely data, can identify opportunities and create competitive advantages when compared to other cities.
Attracting investment to cities
The emergence of a wealth of datasets from an ever-growing number of sources serves as a powerful tool that will enable cities to better understand and adapt to rapidly changing urban environments. It’s a tool that improves the ability of cities to not only assess their individual performance across a number of indicators, but to also compare their performance to other cities in an effort to improve productivity and competitiveness. The ability to compare the competitiveness of cities has led to an increasing use of indexes such as MIT’s Global Mobility Index, the Government of Canada’s Neighbourhood Financial Health Index, and City Observatory’s Storefront Index.
These indexes bring data to life to better understand the systems shaping urban life. For example, you can use data to determine the resiliency of your local economy. If your local economy is not as resilient as you would like, you can compare it against another city that’s improving its resiliency and identify, in a very detailed manner, opportunities to adapt and improve.
As time passes, so does the demand for increasingly credible and insightful data as cities attempt to stay ahead of the competition curve. In 2019, Pew Charitable Trusts and the Economist Group launched The Evidence Initiative, an annual report detailing the quality of the data being produced and used to inform policy-making across a variety of topics in the G20. In the same year, the OECD partnered with Bloomberg Philanthropies to launch a map that illustrates how cities are using data to develop innovative policies so municipal governments can learn how to use data better.
This effort is being supported by a growing number of post-secondary programs including an MsC in Urban Informatics at King’s College in London and at New York University’s Center for Urban Design and Progress. In Los Angeles, they are co-creating data access with the private sector while the World Council on City Data (WCCD) announced the establishment of the Investable Cities Index (ICI). ICI is a platform that will use data from across 17 themes and 100 indicators to produce a detailed analysis about how cities are performing in promoting the attractiveness of a city to a global network of investors. Outside of the WCCD, we’re already witnessing companies like Amazon’s HQ2 using this data to make investment decisions. Investors will be able to use the data to determine economic opportunities and risks in cities. Cities that choose to make intentional progress on key indicators can also find themselves in a much better position to attract and keep investment.
The emergence of magnetic midsize cities
Knowing its economic position today, it’s hard to believe that New Jersey was once the centre of American innovation and ingenuity. In 1870, Thomas Edison set up shop in Menlo Park and invented the modern lab which would develop thousands of patents. It was in Holmdel, New Jersey, that Bell Labs built facilities that housed 6,000 engineers and researchers who helped create many inventions such as the transistor. As more and more investors realize that they can find great talent and strong industry-specialized ecosystems outside of Silicon Valley, it’s not difficult to imagine that the Valley will have to eventually pivot its approach to attracting and retaining talent. If midsize cities like Pittsburgh, Madison, and Indianapolis make the investments needed to advance their primary industries, attracting and keeping talent and investment, they could pull investment away from Silicon Valley.
In 2018, Statistics Canada published a report that shed light on the movement of people in Canada. It was reported that young people were leaving metropolises like Toronto and Vancouver. Between 2012 and 2017, Toronto saw an increase of over 75 per cent of people leaving the area when compared to the data from 2007 2012. This is especially significant when broken down by age: Toronto saw an increase of 306.2 per cent of young people aged 20 to34 leaving the city over those same time periods. These young people are leaving larger Canadian cities for smaller ones, so while Vancouver and Toronto are struggling to fill job vacancies, Victoria and Waterloo’s tech scenes are growing. While midsize cities are not expected to take over their larger counterparts anytime soon, there is evidence that midsize cities can pull investment and talent from big cities.
In the same year as the Statistics Canada report, Brookings Institute also published a study that shed light on the movement of people in the United States. What they found was that the populations of their superstar cities have not been growing like they once were. These large cities have been witnessing the lowest rate of growth in almost thirty years. Only four of the top fifteen fastest-growing American cities were on the coast. In San Francisco, a young person needs 28 years to save for a down payment; it’s nine years in Minneapolis and three in Kansas City. As part of their effort to attract young people who are choosing to leave big cities, midsize cities are making more strategic investments by using data to better understand their urban systems and getting the most value out of their investments. Larger cities that want to support increased productivity are responding to these shifting indicators by investing in the housing, social support and public amenities needed to combat the flight of young people.
Responding to dynamic urban environments
In 2017, the World Economic Forum prepared a report which stated that governments cannot deliver on all of the demands needed for increasingly competitive cities. The deep complexities of cities has long demanded an integrated approach that involves neighbourhood leaders, not for profit sector, the public sector, and private enterprise. This approach speaks to the vast power of incrementalism (small actions that, over time, create transformational change) and partnership (stakeholders joining forces to produce more significant outcomes than what they would have been able to accomplish alone).
A 2019 Boston Consulting Group report found that while cities are full of people overflowing with creativity and innovation, the ability to innovate to solve urban problems had long been siloed within the hands of the few. Over the past decade, innovators have been successful in breaking open these silos by creating tools that enable more people to apply their creativity to solving complex urban problems. To picture how powerful a more decentralized approach to city building can be, we should look at the skilled trades as a source of inspiration.
Whether it’s building Ikea furniture or a new backyard fence, we’ve all been frustrated to some extent when trying so hard to get to a particular outcome. In the skilled trades, when you come across a new challenge you can either see it as something that can’t be overcome or you can see it as an opportunity to solve a problem, just like the audacious innovators who are solving waste management problems. Those who see the opportunity create tools to solve these problems and eventually mass produce those tools for others to solve similar challenges. That’s why at Home Depot, it looks like you can find a tool for just about anything. The wider the range of tools created, the stronger the capacity for projects to be increasingly responsive to complex and unpredictable circumstances, such as the unpredictable dynamics of urban environments.
The power of partnership in city making
In 1992, voters in Utah rejected a tax measure to build light rail transit in Salt Lake Valley. By 2006 residents had not only approved a tax hike to expand light rail options, but they also added a quarter per cent to get the line finished in 2015 instead of 2030. Within seven years, the state had built more than 70 miles of track. When the Chief Capital Officer of the Utah Transit Authority was asked about how they were able to get the public onside, he credited a strong culture of cooperation including UPS running advertisements that showed how transit would help them get packages to customers faster. A culture of partnership and cooperation can also be credited with the success of Portland’s light rail plans, one of the most successful light rail systems in the United States. When a new line is being proposed in Portland, planners actively work with developers to learn whether they would commit to development along the line. In their opinion, developers need to be brought in to get the kind of catalytic investment and transformation needed to make improvements in communities faster. The Salt Lake Region and Portland are two cities, on a small list of cities in North America, that are witnessing decreased congestion even while their population increases.
With the WCCD’s list of over 100 indicators and 136 cities moving out of the top 600 economic powerhouses, the data illustrates the level of investment needed to not only maintain but also improve productivity in a world that is becoming increasingly competitive. The struggle that Utah faced in financing their transit plan, which took almost 15 years, is very similar to the experience faced by many municipal governments around the world. For instance, in 2015, residents in Vancouver rejected a 0.5 per cent tax increase to fund a $7.5 billion regional transportation plan. Meanwhile, similar initiatives were approved in Seattle, Los Angeles and Denver. Transit advantages like this, over time, give less competitive cities the ability to not only catch up with, but also surpass more competitive cities.
The transformation of Fernwood
The power of the government to bring together partners and funds to build cities is significant, but advancing city building does not rest with them alone. In 2005, an inner city community in Victoria called Fernwood was struggling. Buildings were boarded up, local businesses were struggling, vandalism and petty crime were on the increase, and the rising drug trade had resulted in the streets being littered with used needles. It was also the same year that Fernwood Neighbourhood Resource Group, a neighbourhood organization, attempted to take over one of the boarded-up buildings called the Cornerstone Building. Even though they had an agreement for sale with the owner, the organization was unable to access the financing needed to purchase the building.
Years before, Fernwood NRG had been gifted a home which they had repaired and used to house community programs for families. Fernwood made the difficult decision to use the house to finance the purchase of the Cornerstone Building and by partnering with the government, foundations, private donors, and volunteers they converted it into a community space with affordable housing units. The purchase of the building acted as a catapult that regenerated the community and they now operate childcare, family support, recreation, and food access programs. Fernwood NRG has grown to include ownership of a café, a sixplex of affordable housing units, another property that is leased to a charity, and a mixed-use property that supports a walkable community filled with parks, festivals, seasonal markets, and local businesses. This neighbourhood attracts lots of young people now, which in turn, feeds Victoria’s growing tech sector.
As access to a growing treasure trove of urban datasets allows cities to be compared to each other on an increasingly detailed level, so too will the demand by neighbourhoods for meaningful progress. The progress made can then be supported by data. No longer can cities hide behind rhetoric or brilliant marketing campaigns as the data will increasingly lay bare the truth of the lived experience of its residents and the potential of their economy.
It will be quite easy to know how affordable a city is, how much and what kind of talent exists in a city, how much the city values arts and culture, how easy it is to get to the places you need to be, the strength of their environmental resiliency, and much more. For most cities, the vast amount of work that needs to be done to improve their standing across these indicators will demand the involvement of engaged neighbourhoods, the private sector and the public sector wrapped in a culture of partnership.
Adapting to fast paced change
We live in a VUCA world. A world that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. The world is not linear, rather it’s dynamic. Change is certain and is all around us. The stability and growth we face one day can be at risk the next. There are many out there who are working towards building the knowledge, skills and tools that will enable us to flourish in a VUCA world. Many of these specialists settle on the idea we need to create the capacity for which humanity can be more adaptable to change and be in a better position to flourish despite the change.
Adaptation has always been part of human existence. During the fourteenth century’s age of discovery, Italian intellectuals rebelled against Judeo-Christian views of the world that did not align with new findings, such as Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the new world. Born out of this was the Renaissance, a rediscovery of classical philosophy and art. This rediscovery eventually pulled Europe out of the Dark Ages, a period in history known for cultural decline and stagnation. The Renaissance led to the rise to the Age of Enlightenment which laid the groundwork for the emergence of the first industrial revolution. Similarly to the Enlightenment, we have laid the groundwork to enter an era of innovation and disruption never before seen in human history. At the root of this disruption are innovative technologies that will not only create capabilities to transform how we experience the world around us, but also how we understand it.
With the production of vast amounts of data and significant increases in computing power to analyze the data, there is a tremendous amount of insights being created. Some of these insights are and will continue to challenge our worldview. Consider the backlash some of these new insights have been receiving. Data has been able to reveal that families face discrimination in justice, housing, and employment among many other facets of urban life. Similar to New Jersey, those who are able to adapt and evolve, to see the signal through the noise, will reap the significant benefits of this new age while others will continue to stagnate.
A Renewal of Neighbourhood Infrastructure
The decline of Detroit’s auto industry began long before the City’s 2013 filing for bankruptcy. It was in the 1950s, 63 years before the bankruptcy filing, that the city began to witness the start of a decline. The city was unable to create the transformational change needed to pivot its economy and society and maintain its competitiveness. The blame cannot simply be placed on the private sector, the public sector, or its neighbourhoods. While some hold a larger portion of blame, each holds some responsibility. Similar to Detroit’s history, many have been sounding the alarm about the challenges cities face now as we enter the fourth industrial period.
With the emergence of exponential thinking and disruptive innovation, city makers no longer have decades to identify and respond to changes in their urban systems to maintain and improve the quality of life of residents. To adapt to this new era, we will not only need scientists, engineers, and designers. We will need a growing community of creative problem solvers across society, including in our neighbourhoods.
It’s from bringing diverse perspectives and lived experiences to the table that we can more effectively use our finite resources to meaningfully solve systemic urban problems. In Yuval Harari’s book Homo Deus, he eloquently makes the case that the greatest leaps in human progress were not the result of individual acts. Instead, the greatest leaps in human progress have been the result of our ability as a species to cooperate in large numbers. This time in history is no different. Our collective ingenuity will be called upon more often to solve increasingly complex challenges.
The performance of a city is greatly impacted by the performance of its neighbourhoods. In the private and public sector, conversations about the future and evolving to meet the challenges of our fast changing world occur regularly. The ability to evolve in such a world is a challenge to anyone, even to those open to change. For some, their organizations provide them with a tremendous amounts of resources to understand the evolving world around them and acquire the skills and tools needed to thrive in this new industrial period. Unfortunately, neighbourhoods lack similar resources.
In his book The Third Pillar, Raghuram Rajan argues that while the private and public sector are scaling up in their capabilities, neighbourhoods are being left to degrade. Especially during this time of fast-paced change, neighbourhoods are ill-equipped to effectively respond and, as a result, will likely continue to degrade. With a future that involves massive disruptions like artificial intelligence, deep sea mining, and gene editing, the consequences of having neighbourhoods that are not resourced enough to manage all this change will continue to remain significant. Rajan argues that there needs to be a recommitment to strengthening and empowering neighbourhoods.
We Are All City Makers
Imagine Cities was born out of the idea that we need new capabilities to better respond to a dynamic world. New capabilities that enable cross sectoral partnerships to improve outcomes in cities, most importantly for its residents. Our mission is to inform the public, inspire action and act as a catalyst for creating collaborative solutions that strengthen the capacity for cities, and the neighbourhoods within those cities, to adapt in a rapidly changing world. We accomplish this mission by providing neighbourhood leaders and community partners with an ecosystem that enables them to learn, plan, gather resources and act through a digital platform that’s available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
With the massive proliferation of media, we support neighbourhood organizations by wading through content to find credible and important research across 18 categories. We share this research through our search engine. This is intended to support our users and their ability to understand the complexity of creating great neighbourhoods.
As we collect and share research, we come across incredible changemakers who use unique skills and tools to strengthen communities. Similar to a the tools found in a hardware store, our Digital Learning Guides provides access to a wide selection of cutting edge skills and tools used by city makers to improve neighbourhood. It’s remarkable how creative we can be in building solutions to problems and our organization is committed to making those solutions more widely available.
Adaptive Neighbourhood Leadership Certificate
Our ability to adapt in the fast paced world will require a different set of skills. Our leadership certificate provides you with the skills and knowledge needed to quickly identify problems, create plans that have a much higher probability of success, and build solutions that are highly impactful. Upon completing of the course, you will receive a certificate and have a high quality project proposal ready to be added to our Lab.
While it’s great to learn about new ideas to improve neighbourhoods, how do we support change? Our Creative Neighbourhood Lab empowers our community of changemakers by assisting them in receiving the support they need to amplify the change they want to see in their neighbourhoods.
We partner with post-secondary institutions that have programs which provide students with real-world experience and by connecting them to projects led by neighbourhood organizations.
Conclusion
Whether we decide to recognize our responsibility or not, we are all city makers. We’re active in our role as city makers with the choices we make every day. It can be observed in our capacity to be kind to a stranger, choosing to volunteer with or donate to a charity, or choosing to vote. Our actions and the actions of those around us are made visible through the quality of our neighbourhoods, the vibrancy of our economy, and the resiliency of our environment.
We are all city makers. Join our platform.
“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one… I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can… Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”-George Bernard Shaw