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For Release Friday, August 14, 2009
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Th[e] journey may take us through suffering, difficulties, and doubts of all kinds, but they will become our greatest teachers. Through them we will … discover the inner strength and fearlessness we need to emerge from our old habits and set patterns.–Sogyal Rinpoche, Buddhist Teacher

With construction spending and housing prices up, foreclosure rates starting to level off and supersized bonuses returning to Wall Street banks, discussion about America’s Great Recession is starting to recede, giving way to pronouncements, however guarded, of recovery. Whether or not we are in fact emerging from the tumultuous economy of the past two years, with its attendant suffering, difficulties and doubts, the real question before us is, “What, exactly, are we recovering?”

The recent financial collapse, coupled with the election of the nation’s first black president and the end of the eight-year Bush era, have caused many Americans to engage in a kind of national soul-searching. They are asking basic, existential questions about the purpose of our economy and society and the values upon which they’ve been built. They’ve talked about doing more with less, placing limits on the excesses and greed of corporate America and redefining success and the American Dream.

And yet, to the extent that we appear to be judging the prospects of a recovery on the very kinds of economic indicators that got us into trouble in the first place (housing supply, housing prices and Wall Street profits, principal among them), perhaps a recovery is not what we should be shooting for. And herein lies the great challenge the events of the past couple of years have revealed.

At bottom, the economic crisis is not about subprime mortgages, credit default swaps and the avarice of investment bankers. It’s not really about the economy at all. Rather, it’s about our ability as Americans to acknowledge our mistakes and to commit to correcting them. It’s about our capacity to move beyond entrenched mental models and behaviors and to engage reality on its own terms. It’s a crisis of culture.

Appropriately, so much of this crisis has played out on our landscape, literally. The real estate boom of the past decade, the latest chapter in the two centuries’ old spread of the population across the continent and the Great Recession’s prime protagonist, fueled a relentless pattern of sprawl–low-density, auto-dependent development–and expansion. From the square footage of the average single-family home and the building envelope of big-box stores to vehicle miles traveled and rates of land consumption, everything ballooned. But as the financial collapse proved, such growth was not sustainable.

Settlement patterns are powerful proxies for our cultural attitudes and belief systems. By reading the patterns, by reading the landscape, we can observe clues about what we, as a nation, believe in. Low-density settlement, big buildings and cars and highways: these are among our cardinal credos, steeped in Jefferson’s agrarian vision, committed to the notion that “bigger is better and safer” and shaped by the compelling car-romance motifs of Madison Avenue.

Interestingly, there are signs that our land use patterns might be changing as a result of the current crisis. Though not touted as indicators of a recovery, these signs suggest that, at least in terms of development patterns, we are starting to learn from our past mistakes.

For example, take the City of Boston’s proposed bike sharing program, the largest of its kind in the U.S. Modeled after similar programs in Paris and Copenhagen, Boston’s proposal is evidence that municipalities are starting to take seriously the idea that urban mobility doesn’t begin and end with the automobile. Meanwhile, at the regional scale, New England’s governors met recently to discuss a high-speed rail network linking the region’s six states and Canada, again borrowing from the European model. There’s even talk of a bullet train from Boston to Montreal.

Perhaps most impressive, if not surprising, is what’s happening in Washington, where the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is in the process of launching a new Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities. Equal parts housing, transportation, land use and energy, the new program seeks for the first time to join these discrete policy areas in one, unified strategy for making U.S. cities more livable, affordable and climate-friendly, bucking the trend of the last 50 years of metropolitan development.

A new pattern might be emerging, but it’s too early to say. What is clear is that to break our set patterns, we will need to be bold, knowing that old habits die hard. In this sense, what we should be aiming for is not so much a recovery as a discovery–of innovative ways of building and developing, of time-tested models from other places, like Europe and Japan, where transit, density and mixed use development have been the rule, not the exception and, at last, of our own inner-strength and fearlessness, born of today’s adversity.

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William Shutkin, director of the Initiative for Sustainable Development and Chair in Sustainable Development at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business, can be reached at william.shutkin@colorado.edu.

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