Recovery Through Self-Discovery

"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."

By focusing on development and city building, Shutkin says the U.S. can revise the culture of waste that brought about the economic downturn.