Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Erickson

A planner’s rebuke disguised as a simple observation: “Our settlement of land is without regard to the best use of land” lands like a clean line in a drawing - spare, controlled, and quietly devastating. Arthur Erickson isn’t lamenting that we build; he’s indicting how casually we decide where and why. “Settlement” evokes pioneers and inevitability, the comforting myth that development is destiny. Erickson punctures that romance by attaching it to negligence: not merely imperfect choices, but choices made “without regard.”

The phrase “best use” is doing double duty. On the surface it sounds like real estate language, the market’s favorite moral alibi. Coming from an architect who spent his career arguing for civically ambitious, landscape-attentive modernism, it’s closer to an ethical standard: land as ecology, public realm, and long-term infrastructure, not just a commodity to be parceled and paved. The subtext is that sprawl isn’t an accident; it’s a culture of short horizons. We optimize for the immediate - cheap lots, quick commutes, private views - and externalize the rest: flood risk, loss of farmland, car dependence, dead downtowns.

Erickson worked in Vancouver and across Canada as cities ballooned in the postwar era, when zoning, highways, and suburban aspiration teamed up to make “use” synonymous with consumption. The line reads now like a prophecy with receipts. It’s less a design critique than a civic one: a reminder that the built environment is policy made visible, and that indifference is itself a plan.