Ebook: Housing by people : towards autonomy in building environments

John Turner’s book is about housing, but it is also about the
basic things in people’s lives, the forces that control them
and what people themselves are able to control. As Colin Ward says in his Preface, Turner is “something much rarer than a housing experts: he is a philosopher of housing, seeking answers to questions which are so fundamental that they seldom get asked.”
Similar in many ways to the works of Ivan Illich and E. F.
Schumacher, Housing by People also expresses the belief
thal networks of people can take hold of their own surroundings
and order them intelligently without experts to decide
what they need. Turner shows that in housing a most basic
part of our daily environment has escaped our grasp. Using
examples from underdeveloped as well as developed countries
he describes the kind of housing that has been imposed
upon people by their governments and sets it against what
individual communities can achieve when allowed to help
determine the housing they will have. He argues convincingly
that housing policies need not be dictated by central
governments but can be put under local control. This is
not to say that housing must be left to free enterprise or that
modern technology should be abandoned; Turner maintains
that local communities can be given access to national
resources for meeting their own needs.