Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Erickson

A continent built at speed often ends up borrowing its soul off the shelf. When architect Arthur Erickson calls the Americas' Achilles heel a "lack of cultural confidence", he isn't diagnosing an inferiority complex so much as a design problem: societies that see themselves as provisional tend to build provisionally. The phrase "typical of new settlers" carries a quiet indictment. Settler cultures, in Erickson's framing, arrive with ambition and anxiety in equal measure, measuring themselves against older capitals and importing legitimacy rather than generating it.

The line works because it flips the usual triumphalist script of the Americas as eternally new, inventive, unburdened. Erickson points at the cost of that freshness: a nagging sense that "real" culture happens elsewhere, that the local is merely regional, that seriousness requires a European accent. For an architect, this isn't abstract. Cultural confidence shows up in whether cities preserve what they build, whether public institutions commission risk, whether modernism becomes an original language or a secondhand dialect. You can hear the critique of copy-and-paste civic grandeur, of downtowns chasing Paris or Manhattan instead of their own climate, materials, and histories.

Context matters: Erickson worked in a Canadian and broader North American landscape perpetually negotiating between colonial inheritance and a desire for self-definition. His jab at "settlers" also carries the shadow of who gets centered as cultural authors - and who gets treated as background. The subtext is that confidence isn't just pride; it's the courage to claim continuity, to treat place as origin rather than outpost.