We have been assailed these past few years with images of destruction of houses and housing, from Ukraine to Turkey and Syria to Gaza. Always families, always children, always bits of fabric and shoes lying on the grey dust of exploded concrete. And then there are the long lines of refugees, crossing seemingly impenetrable barriers, from the Rio Grande to the cage that the militarised border between Belarus and Poland became two years ago: migrants encouraged to that wire border and then trapped, like animals. And now the mass migration of Palestinians from north Gaza to south Gaza, a distance akin to moving a million people from north Calgary to south of the Bow River while being bombed all the way.
Where are people to live? How can they possibly live? Does shelter become a jacket pulled over the head so one can sleep, as I found in my alley, in the rain, last week? Gaza, Ein El Hilweh, Jenin: refugee camps old enough to be built in concrete looking deceptively like apartment blocks, which they are, but they are also temporary housing, full of generations of people waiting to return to their houses they had to leave in 1948. Homelessness is being inherited all over the world, no longer a temporary condition.
The relationship between migration and homelessness brought on from war, climate change, inequities and bureaucratic fossilisation, does not give refugees any autonomy: they are simply indications of governmental failures and treated not as human beings, but as synecdoches of failures in infrastructure, human rights, diplomacy, politics, intelligence, kindness. Collateral damage, breaking eggs for omelettes, human shields: these are excuses for a collective inhumanity.
How to rethink the provision of housing, for the government-down building of housing is an ineffective model — too slow, too bureaucratic, too expensive, viz. northern housing for Indigenous peoples, urban housing for people living on sidewalks in our wealthy, first-world cities, UNHCR tent cities. Where is adequate housing as a human right? Antonio Guterres is increasingly desperate to remind the world that human rights exist: the right to water, food and shelter.
It is possible that we are looking at the inability to house mobile and temporary populations, at any scale, too abstractly as just so many needy bodies? for this is our fear if we lost our own housing. The complexity of people in motion, their skills, their ambitions, their resourcefulness inverts their presence from a problem to be fixed to a resource to be supported.
John F C Turner died in September 2023 at 96, a long life; Geoffrey Payne wrote his obituary in The Guardian, headed by this picture:
Similar-looking piles of rubble, but Turner’s example, which became the basis for his life’s work, is El Ermitaño settlement, a barriada. As Payne neatly describes the conditions Turner studied: ‘Predominantly poor people moved on to land on the urban periphery, subdivided it into residential plots and places for community facilities, and built their own housing using whatever materials came to hand. Settlements were improved gradually as people became integrated into the urban economy, making urban development effectively self-financed.’
This is squatting. The land isn’t obviously owned, but a claim is made and housing is built, but is always insecure without land title. The granting of land title is in the purview of civic, regional, state government. Do they grant it? or do they not. As Turner saw it, there is an almost ancient process and an imperative whereby people build their own houses and communities, according to their own needs, wishes and skills. Bureaucracy can only get in the way.
Land ownership is critical; clearly people know, or once did know, how to build both buildings and community already – that is a living resource. They need to be allowed to build. This seemingly anarchic position has a lineage: Patrick Geddes, whose Cities in Evolution, according to Colin Ward, is ‘a handbook on the involvement of the citizen in environmental decision-making’, the sociologist and architecture critic Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities (1938), and Freedom, a newspaper founded by Peter Kropotkin, edited by Colin Ward, which in 1948 carried a piece by Giancarlo de Carlo formulating an anarchist approach to housing. These are Turner’s influences.
After leaving the AA John Turner went to Peru in 1954 to work with state housing agencies coping with earthquake displacement as the South American plate slides over the Nazca Plate, lifting the Andes and forming a trench between Peru and Chile. Much action, much destruction, ongoing need for housing stratgies. Squatter settlements had good strategies, rebuilding quickly, economically and with local labour and materials. They were however deemed slums and slated for clearance by local authorities and politicians; Turner was part of a movement to recognise how suited these self-generated processes were to the realities of the land.
It takes a lifetime to recognise the seminal influences on one’s thinking, and in this case, reading Colin Ward’s introduction to Housing by People. Towards autonomy in building environments of 1976, I realise now just how much of this thinking swirled around the AA in the 1960s and70s.
While in Lima, Turner was visited by Monica Pidgeon, en route to Chile. Pidgeon was the editor of Architectural Design from 1946 to 1975, and offered Turner an issue to edit in 1963 and in 1968 published his critical essay, ‘Squatter Housing: an Architecture that Works’. If I ever had someone in mind as a model, it would be Monica Pidgeon. From her wikipedia entry: ‘Under Pidgeon, Architectural Design featured well-known and little-known architects, showcased post-war reconstructive architecture, and promoted sustainable design. Pidgeon also avoided criticism: she believed that it was better not to write anything about poor designs and buildings than to publish critical reviews.’
John Turner gave an open series of lectures at the AA the first year I was there, in 1973. Students rarely investigate the deep histories of those speaking, they just absorb what they are saying. I can still remember specific slides he used. Primed by Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects of 1964, Victor Papanek’s 1971 Design for the Real World, and Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue which started in 1968, Turner’s presentation of autonomous housing and community building seemed so self-evident, why would it be any other way? Turner was just one stream of many at the AA, developing from the Tropical School, added to by Martin Pawley and his 1975 book Garbage Housing. These were formative messages, that autonomous housing does not always have palatable rules and that community cannot be intellectually designed.
Given the massive failures to provide housing so far in the twenty-first century, we might question the word provide and revisit John Turner’s propositions.
In Housing by People, published by Marion Boyars (yet another vanguard figure) in 1976, John Turner studied the barrios, tenements, squatters and builders in Mexico, using five prototypes: the car painter, the mason, the factory worker, the factory employee and the vendor. Even five prototypes is a coarse grain, however he evaluates their access to housing as a series of fine balances and trade-offs between price, cost, income and fixed assets; social access, security of tenure, employment access and physical standards. Five to the eighth I think this makes the possible combinations. These are the basic components of housing for Turner, each with a near infinite number of shades and levels, i.e. the vendor is overtly the most successful of the five prototypes. She is needed as a food provider, she can make connections for supply, she has earned enough to have a good house, no one is about to move her on. The only fragile part is land tenure, but by squatting the vendor finds that the value of the land she sits on is insulated from inflation and market forces, thus allowing her to prosper. The car painter is the most precarious prototype, those with almost nothing. However, living in a shack behind his god-mother’s house, he is able to maximise savings, and opportunities can be realised because of his mobility due to lack of fixed assets. No matter what one’s status, there are advantages to be found. There are finely-tuned relationships of obligation and responsibility between what we perhaps consider merely squatters, the poor, the homeless: there are powerful social relationships that form a supportive community – something those with power signally fail to recognise. John Turner took seriously the outlaw systems of informal housing as legitimate and logical systems.
He wrote about land: ‘a resource commonly assumed to be controlled by law or corporations, whether public or private. But most land and space for building in Mexico and many other cities is to be found within the existing built-up areas and in small parcels which are commonly regarded as useless by government housing authorities.’ (p85) In a footnote to this he writes that there was, in 1945 – another era of extreme homelessness after WWII, sufficient land in small unused plots in the London Borough of Newham for 4,000 dwellings. Despite the need, this resource was considered useless as the plots were too small, scattered and irregular to be dealt with by the council’s ‘large and cumbersome administrative machinery’. To me, this is the crux, even today.
Our cities are plagued by zoning, minimum dwelling sizes, setbacks and land use strictures. Developer packages sail through civic planning offices despite their land and space wastefulness, their hostile and defensive organisation that works against community building and diversity of economic status, age, ethnicity and transport options. Putting one small house on a small leftover triangle of no-mans land mowed once a year by the city takes years to get approval, and probably in the end, won’t get it.
Re-reading Turner, I remember why I have long been against zoning which separates civic life into ghettos: one rarely lives where one works, groceries are elsewhere, large roads connect and divide at the same time; the average Canadian city is a truly horrible and alienating environment, so prosperous, so private, and we don’t have war, floods or earthquakes as an excuse. It was Turner, but it was also the seven years I worked for Jack Long, a fairly maverick architect in Calgary whose mid-career McGill planning thesis was titled Everyman the Planner. And it was also Danilo Undovicki-Selb, the eminent Le Corbusier scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, whose design studios routinely addressed environmental racism in East Austin where I-35 neatly divides the haves from the have nots.
Housing by People is a guidebook for recognising how to invert seemingly impenetrable conditions: reform is active, at the bottom, with the people. Do not bother to tinker with the top, with governments and corporations. Spend one’s entire life doing this, with eyes wide open, as did Turner. The problem of dislocation and temporary shelter is not to be solved, but to be turned to advantage.
As a student, these were the kinds of images that were so thrilling. One sensed there were other worlds out there, in motion.
Thanks for that Stephanie. Since Turner's death I've been thinking about the profound influence he has had on my life, both professional and personal. While I was in architecture school back in the 70s there were two books I kept close at hand – Freedom to Build and Architecture for the Poor. I’ve been trying to recall how I gravitated towards these two books rather than, say, Complexity and Contradiction. It might have been the articles in AD (probably first the 1968 article: Squatter Settlements: An Architecture that Works) but it led me eventually to Housing by People and the Colin Ward introduction. That, in turn, opened the door to a whole world of anarchist literature beginning with Kropotkin and Mutual Aid.
It sounds, from your piece here, that we have followed a somewhat similar path and Turner pointed the way.
Thanks for your article.
Graeme