Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments

by John F.C. Turner, Colin Ward (Introduction)

John Turner's classic essay makes a unique contribution to housing theory and practise. His Three Laws of Housing summarize the psychological, social and economic basis of his 1: When people have no control over, nor responsibility for, key decisions in the housing process, dwelling environments may become a barrier to personal fulfilment and a burden on the economy. 2. The important thing about housing is not what it is but what it does in people's lives. 3. Deficiencies and imperfections in your housing are infinitely more tolerable if they are your responsibility than if they are somebody else's. John Turner was born in 1927 in London. He took a Degree at the Architectural Association in London and then lived in Peru from 1957 until 1965, working for Peruvian government housing agencies, contributing to their programmes for community action and self-help housing in villages and urban squatter settlements. From 1965 to 1973 he lived in Massachusettes, USA and was an associate with MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). He returned to London in 1973 and worked at the AA in the Developmental Planning Unit. He now lives in Hastings, East Sussex.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction, Urban Studies, Politics, History, Urban

176 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1976

About the author

John F.C. Turner (9 July 1927 – 3 September 2023) was a British architect and theorist known for his work on informal self-help housing and neighborhood building in Peru, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Reviews

[Steffan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend for anyone thinking about housing and housing policy. Turner draws on his experience of informal settlements in Peru in the 1960s to argue that we need to see housing as having multiple functions the importance of which will differ depending on the circumstances of a persons life and evolve over time.

Key Themes
1. The housing should be considered as a multi-dimensional process rather than simply the provision of housing
2. Housing is a combination of factors including:
1. Location and accessibility - how is a home connected to employment opportunities, services and social networks (family, friends), transport connectivity and cost. In low income countries a shack can provide a source of income as it is both a home and a small shop near to a source of people
2. Income, Price, Cost & Assets - what percentage of a households income is spent on housing, what assets do they have as a result, how does this balance against other expenditures (consumption, savings e.g. retirement, future home, investments in education, etc.)
3. Space and Comfort - how much value is place on physical comfort and space will vary according to peoples circumstances - single, early 20s man vs family with 2 children
4. Tenure - some people will value short-term tenancies allowing for flexibility to move for work, etc. Other may wish for longer term tenures which provide a degree of security without a large, illiquid asset in case circumstances change, and others such as families or those in retirement may want the long-term security of owning a property. Tenure can be thought of as a balance between transferability and security.
3. Different people have different circumstances, resources, ambitions / requirements for the future and they should be free to choose housing which best fits their requirements. The key point being that a home with higher levels of comfort could make the household worse off whilst simultaneously improving their 'comfort' i.e. if people become detached from source of employment / social network or costs too high a proportion of income meaning that they have to sacrifice food, clothing etc.
4. Large, centralised, hierarchical organisations (public and private) are incapable of meeting these requirements in particular because these may change rapidly as the households circumstances change (pregnancy, illness, new work, etc.)

Solutions / Policy Implications
1. Proscriptive rather than prescriptive policies
2. Governments should not build houses for people but provide them with affordable land, access to infrastructure and utilities, access to finance, and legal frameworks
Enable individuals, households and communities to make the best, most efficient use of the resources they already have

[g · Rating 3 out of 5]

tja. woonanarchisme, wat als iedereen gewoon woont en bouwt waar die zelf wil. zeg t maar...

de stelling van dit boek is, heel kort gezegd, als volgt: we zouden met zn allen beter af zijn als we voor de productie en voor het onderhoud van huizen niet leunen op grote marktpartijen of op de overheid - turner: 'gecentraliseerde woonsystemen' - maar liever op kleine, lokale samenwerkingsverbanden die beter kunnen voorzien in de behoeftes van de daadwerkelijke bewoners. gecentraliseerde woonsystemen staan namelijk zo ver af van inwoners dat de woonwensen geabstraheerd worden tot getallen, tot vierkante meters vloeroppervlak, tot een minimumdikte voor spouwmuren, tot minimumlengtes voor aanrechten. of wellicht nog erger, in het geval van commerciele partijen worden woonwensen ondergeschikt aan simpel winstbejag. dit alles terwijl woonwensen van mensen uiteraard héél divers zijn en helemaal niet zo stelselmatig ondergebracht kunnen worden.

hierdoor ontstaan er namelijk allerlei 'mismatches' tussen bewoners en hun woonwensen. een voorbeeld dat turner noemt (blz 122-123): in het vk in de jaren 70 was het alleen voor net getrouwde echtparen mogelijk om een hypotheek te krijgen. dit klinkt als een bizarre wet uit een ver verleden, maar vergist u zich niet: ook in nederland in 2025 bestaat ook allemaal dit soort regelgeving. door gecentraliseerde, 'heteronome' structuren te doorbreken kunnen bewoners 'autonome' bouw- en woonnetwerken opbouwen.

eerlijk: het standpunt dat turner inneemt is héél sympathiek vanuit het perspectief van iemand die opeens overvallen wordt door een ambtenaar van omgevingsdienst regio nijmegen die om 8 uur s avonds even wil controleren of het aantal bedden in je huis wel voldoet aan het omgevingsplan van de gemeente berg en dal. (rot gewoon op. !!!!!) (iemand die prettig op een vakantiepark woont maar uitgezet dreigt te worden kan deze stelling ook wel waarderen lijkt me.)

ik begon aan dit boek met de verwachting dat er vooral normatieve argumenten zouden worden gemaakt. helaas is dit echter niet geval. turner onderbouwt deze stelling aan de hand van praktijkvoorbeelden van illegaal gebouwde wijken met name in zuid-amerika. daar is zelfbouw handiger en vooral kostenefficienter, betoogt turner. hoe zou dit er in de praktijk uitzien in andere delen van de wereld? ik ga heel eerlijk zijn het was lastig om hem in de praktische implicaties van zijn principes te volgen. voor een groot deel vervalt turner in maniertjes die typisch zijn voor dit soort boeken uit de jaren 70 (zoals diagrammen die heel vanzelfsprekend lijken maar eigenlijk totaal onbegrijpelijk zijn). wat iig heel duidelijk was: geen omgevingsplannen die gebaseerd zijn op geboden maar op verboden. stel een boel proscriptieve kaders op en laat mensen het binnen die regelgeving uitvogelen. (volgens mij is dit een beetje hoe bestemmingsplannen in heel veel landen o.a. japan nu al werken?)

afijn. ja ja er is een wooncrisis en die moet aangepakt worden. hochstenbach en zijn vriendjes willen weer terug naar de 'volkshuisvesting' van weleer. maar als je één blik op de pagina 'woningdelen' op de entree-site werpt krijg je direct weerzin tegen dit soort starre bureaucratie. heeft turner misschien toch een punt.

[Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disappointing book. Anarchist urban theorists are few and far between, so I had high hopes of radical new ways to think about urban space. Unfortunately, the book is pretty fluffy: you can sort of guess where he's going with things if you've ever heard or read a contemporary anarchist critique of state-Marxists. Here's the gist: capitalist housing market: fail. State-created housing: fail. Solution: let poor people work it out for themselves, either by leaving them the fuck alone, or (if you're a government that really wants to help) subsidize easy-to-use building materials like corrugated steel and cinder blocks.

Not that that's not a good idea. To me, however, this book didn't make that argument very forcefully, and doesn't consider the repercussions of making policy recommendations fully enough. Some of that is 20/20 hindsight on my part, I'll admit: The World Bank, in it's way, is influenced by Turner. To millions if not billions of squatters the world over, I have to imagine, benevolent neglect by the state just isn't cutting it.

[Mochammad Yusni · Rating 4 out of 5]

A kind of book that I read quite slow because I need the richness of his thoughts for my own research. Turner really laid the foundation on how we should think about housing the people (mostly the poor); because they do need different kind of environment, and we should not just use standardized modern housing as solution for all. As an urban researcher who lives in cities with many traditional neighborhoods, this book really gives me so many arguments why sometimes we should preserve (not destroy) and opening participation for the communities (not ignoring), to really give the most effective solution for the housing crisis. Which should not only be seen in a term of numbers, but also how far the house gives benefit to the owners.

[Sherief · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times perhaps a bit Utopian, at others it gives itself away as a product of 70s urban anarchism, Turner's book makes up for this in it's enthusiasm for self-help solutions to housing problems and a fundamental belief in people's ability to successfully manage their own destinies and lives without the overbearing interventions of large, centrally managed systems. That run on sentence was just my way of gushing about the book a bit. It's always good to read something a bit anti-technocratic, a bit sardonic and nonetheless proposing some interesting and pragmatic solutions.

[S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm so late on reading this one - although it was published a few decades ago 1976!

According to Turner, housing issues and problems stem from the inadequacy of heavily centralized tools to offer a wide range of personalized products. In other words, the implementation of the industrial production logics cannot be efficient in providing personalized housing products. It is also, far fetched to think of a system that could take into account all of this variety given the complexity and finite resources. Turner suggests an alternative by re-framing the housing crisis and adopting a scientific methodology: What's the question if housing was the answer?

In this book he is generally focused on the difference between proscriptive and prescriptive texts. It is interesting from a historical point of view as he cites the example of Edward II: he brought people together before building a village. And this was a notion I recently was reminded of by Cities and Caliphs: On the Genesis of Arab Muslim Urbanism : even in the making of new Islamic cities was conducted in tight consultation with the local population that might as well just arrived. And this indirectly helped me define a clearer transition from a nomadic lifestyle to an urban sedentary one ...

He draws from his extensive research and work on field to present a program that could help in better understanding the housing issues that could be addressed differently.

[Raven · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the vantage of San Francisco in 2020 this book is refreshingly difficult to categorize ideologically. I would call it, pragmatic anarchism - Turner basically says just let people figure their housing out for themselves, but with quite a bit more nuance and acknowledging the practical difficulties.

Some random notes:

Turner is big on "local control" but means something very different than what that means in the 21st century American context. He means it as a mechanism for maximizing use-value in housing for poor households through autonomy to build or modify their home (as opposed to a mechanism for preserving/increasing speculative land values - the homeovoters hypothesis).

The book also has valuable discussion on proscriptive vs prescriptive regulation in planning systems (Turner says basically regulation should be limit-setting and you should let people figure out how to operate within those limits) and that planning should get out of the design business altogether (which I very much agree with).

It's also worth heeding his recounting of the disastrous record of centrally administered sites and services public housing programs, since those are now somewhat again in vogue. Helpful that this critique is leftist (or at least leftist adjacent) and pro-poor since so many critiques of public housing come from the right.

Altogether, a thought provoking read but definitely only recommended for built environment specialists.

[Girma Tafa]

learn and learn

[Andini Mokodompit · Rating 3 out of 5]

he said that a house is a process not only a product. I like it most

[Norman Fellows · Rating 2 out of 5]

Turner is too narrow.