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Page 1: John Turner's Views on Housing

Habitat International 27 (2003) 245–269

A double irony: the originality and influenceof John F.C. Turner

Richard Harris*

School of Geography and Geology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont. L8S 4K1, Canada

Received 1 September 2001; accepted 15 October 2001

Abstract

John F.C. Turner deserves a different reputation than that which he has acquired. Over the post-warperiod, Turner has been the most influential writer about housing in the developing world. Most writerssuppose that in the 1960s, as an advocate of self-help, he changed the way researchers thought abouthousing, and that in the 1970s his ideas influenced the World Bank to initiate major sites-and-servicesprojects. In fact, Turner was not the first to advocate self-help; his warm reception indicates that his ideaswere widely shared, and less revolutionary than many suppose; his most original argument about dwellingcontrol had limited influence. This irony was compounded at the time that the World Bank adopted aidedself-help, for Turner was eloquently critical of this form of policy. Turner’s contribution was to bring LatinAmerican ideas about squatter settlements to the attention of urban scholars around the world. He addedhis voice, and the squatter experience, to a growing chorus of western writers who spoke of the rights andcapacities of the urban poor. He built on an intellectual and planning tradition, expanding our notion ofself-help and systematically exploring its implications.r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: John Turner; History of housing thought; Self-help; Sites-and-services

1. Introduction

In the late 1960s, John Turner changed the way we think about low-cost housing. He taught usto value self-help, to think of housing as a verb, to see squatter settlements as solutions, not

Abbreviations: EcoSoc: Economic and Social Council; HHFA: Housing and Home Finance Agency; HUD:

Department of Housing and Urban Development; NA: US National Archives, Washington, DC; UNA: United

Nations Archives, New York City.

*Tel.: +1-905-525-9140, Ext. 27216; fax: +1-905-546-0463.

E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Harris).

0197-3975/03/$ - see front matter r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

PII: S 0 1 9 7 - 3 9 7 5 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 4 8 - 6

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problems. As a result, in the early 1970s the World Bank began to fund site-and-service schemeswhereby governments helped people to acquire modest homes by building their own (WorldBank, 1972, 1973). Such, at any rate, is the conventional narrative. But this account neglects someinconvenient facts. Turner was not the first to praise self-help, which had been advocatedconsistently by other experts, and by international agencies, since the late 1940s (Harris & Giles,2003). Turner did add something to the debates about self-help housing but, ironically, his mostoriginal argument, an emphasis on dwelling control, has proved to be the least influential. Indeed,compounding the irony, at the moment when the World Bank was launching its housing initiative,Turner (1972a) went public with an eloquent criticism of state-aided schemes. What are we tomake of this double irony? To clarify and answer this question we need to re-examine Turner’scontribution to our understanding of self-help housing in the developing world.

Such a re-examination must focus on the period when Turner’s reputation was formed. Hisinterest in community development began in the late 1940s, while his more specific views onhousing evolved after 1957, when he moved to Peru.1 He wrote his first report on housing in 1959;published his first scholarly work in 1963, and followed this with a steady stream of papers andthen books. These developed a consistent point of view that rapidly gained influence. It informednot only the thinking of the World Bank but also the agenda of the UN’s Habitat conference in1976. By then, Turner had acquired the reputation that has persisted to this day. Concentratingon the period 1957–1976, and drawing upon correspondence at the UN archives as well asTurner’s own recollections, this paper offers a reassessment that sets Turner’s ideas in theirhistorical context.

After sketching Turner’s ideas, I review how they have been summarized and evaluated byother writers (Section 2). Typically, Turner has been seen as an original and indeed, within thehousing field, a revolutionary. I probe this view showing that some elements of Turner’s argumentwere not new and arguing that the original elements of his thinking were those that had the leastinfluence (Section 3). I then examine how his ideas were first received (Section 4). I show thatTurner’s ideas were shared by a number of experts, including Ernest Weissman, who employedTurner as a consultant twice, in 1959 and in 1964–1965. On the second of these occasions, Turnerand Weissman’s office prepared a report that is supposed to have had an almost revolutionaryimpact. In fact, its initial reception was warm, indicating that Turner’s ideas agreed with asubstantial and growing body of opinion in the1960s. I speculate as to how Turner’s ideas aboutself-help came to acquire their mythic reputation (Section 5), and conclude by suggesting thattheir significance is rather different than has commonly been supposed.

2. John Turner’s ideas and reputation

Among those who have written about housing policy in the developing world there is no onewho has had more influence than John Turner. In academic circles the simplest measure ofinfluence are citations. Turner published his first paper in 1963, and the first published citation tohis work appeared in 1965. Between 1965 and 1998 he was cited an additional 682 times in social

1Turner (1972a, p. 123) has commented that ‘‘it was only after living and working in Peru that I began to articulate

the dissatisfaction shared with so many contemporaries.’’

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science journals.2 By comparison, in the same period Charles Abrams, probably Turner’s closestcompetitor in terms of academic influence in the housing field, received 416 citations. Moresignificant than the aggregate number is the pattern of change (Fig. 1). Abrams was the moresenior of the two, and was much more widely read in the 1960s. In the decade after 1965 Abramsreceived 198 citations, compared with 90 for Turner. Since the mid-1970s, however, Turner hasconsistently been referenced at least twice as often. In the past quarter-century he has been thebest known and most influential writer about housing in the developing world.

2.1. Ideas

One of the most distinctive features of Turner’s thinking, by comparison with that of CharlesAbrams and indeed almost everyone else who has written on the subject of housing, is itsconsistency of focus and outlook. Abrams’ most significant book, Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an

Urbanizing World (1964), summarized much of his knowledge and ideas on the subject and waswell received. Reviewers praised it for being ‘‘comprehensive’’ (e.g. Buchanan, 1967, p. 187;Mann, 1964), and the author for his refusal to offer ‘‘simple’’, ‘‘spectacular’’, or ‘‘package’’solutions (Cullingworth, 1964, p. 342; Lubove, 1965, p. 489; Jones, 1966, p. 69). Typically, forexample, Abrams gave only qualified endorsement to self-help, suggesting that ‘‘excessive claims’’had been made on its behalf (Abrams, 1964, p. 173). In Abrams’ work there were many insights,but no single line of argument.

Fig. 1. Citations to the work of Charles Abrams and John Turner, 1956–1998. (Source: Compiled from Social Science

Citation Index (annual)

2This figure was derived from a tabulation of citations in the Social Sciences and Humanities Citation Index, and

excludes self-citations. Reliance on this source underestimates Turner’s influence relative to that of many other writers,

including Charles Abrams, since it does not include citations in architectural journals. The latter were included in the

Humanities Citation Index, but this did not begin publication until the 1970s.

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In contrast, Turner’s writings have expressed a consistent point of view and also, for a longformative period, had a consistent focus. Turner recalls that it was the work of Lewis Mumford,Patrick Geddes, and Peter Kropotkin, whom he read as an architectural student in the late 1940s,that imparted in him a lifelong concern for community development and for fulfillment throughpersonal autonomy (Turner, 2000). Central to these concerns has been the issue of control. Thisorientation acquired a focus after he moved to Peru in 1957 when, through force of circumstance,he became interested in self-help housing. For two decades, this was almost the exclusive focusof his academic writing (Turner, 1959, 1963, 1965, 1967, 1968a, b, 1972a, b, 1976a, b; Turner &Fichter, 1972). His name became synonymous with self-help housing, to a degree that he cameto regret since it sometimes obscured his larger concerns (Turner, 2000). As he commentedin 1992, ‘‘like a cat with a tin tied to its tail, I long to shake off the ‘self-help housing’ label.’’(Turner, 1992).

By self-help Turner has always meant not only the investment of sweat equity by owners intheir homes but also the processes of owner-design and management. It is the element ofautonomy—which he has defined as the issue of ‘‘who decides’’—that is fundamental (Turner,1976a, pp. 11–34). It was on the basis of their differing ‘‘structure[s] of authority and control’’ thathe preferred owner-built homes, however modest, to public housing, however well built (Turner,1976b, p. 5). Owner-building itself, however, was not the issue. ‘‘The best results are obtained bythe user who is in full control of the design, construction, and management of his own home,’’ hehas argued, while ‘‘it is of secondary importance whether or not he builds it with his own hands,unless he is very poor’’ (Turner, 1972b, p. 158). By ‘best results’ Turner means houses that bestsuit the changing needs and circumstances of their occupants. In view of the extended process bywhich homes are framed, adapted, and used by their occupants, and in a phrase that others haveechoed, he has suggested that housing should be viewed not as a noun but as a verb.

Turner has commonly been interested in situations where self-help involved mutual aid betweenfamilies, and within larger communities. In recent years his interests have broadened beyondhousing to the larger processes of community development. In this context, perhaps his mostfundamental argument is that in building the types of homes and communities that they do, poorfamilies act just as rationally as anyone else. This was his point of departure in making sense of hisown observations and experiences in the urban barriadas of Peru between 1957 and 1965. Fromthis experience he concluded that urban squatters in the developing world are the best judge oftheir own needs, and are better able than anyone else (including governments) to address them.The corollary is that the settlements that squatters create are better fitted to their immediate needsand circumstances than those that any government could devise. Although in their early years ofdevelopment these settlements may appear disorganized and inadequate, they express their ownlogic and will be improved over time if family finances allow. To this process of improvementTurner gave the label ‘‘progressive development,’’ contrasting it with the ‘‘instant development’’of public housing schemes (Turner, 1967, pp. 177–179). He concluded, in a turn of phrase thatwas also employed by his colleague in Peru, the anthropologist William Mangin, thatsquatter settlements should be viewed more as a solution than as a problem (Mangin, 1967;Turner, 1968a).

Some of Turner’s arguments about self-help are consistent with a conservative brand ofpolitical economy, but his thinking has always been most strongly informed by the philosophy ofanarchism (Ward, 1976). Friends with Ivan Illich, he has acknowledged intellectual debts to Peter

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Kropotkin as well as (more frequently) to the Scottish biologist and urban planner PatrickGeddes. Within this line of thinking there is a deep skepticism of government and indeed allagencies external to the residential communities within which people live. Turner’s views on thispoint have remained remarkably consistent, and were expressed in the conclusion to the specialissue of Architectural Design that he prepared in 1963. In this conclusion, co-authored withCatherine Turner and Patrick Crooke, Turner insisted on the importance of ‘‘spontaneity’’,something that would ‘‘tend to wither and die in the more deliberate embrace of outside agencies’’(Turner, Turner, & Crooke, 1963, p. 393). The role of such agencies was to work ‘‘not ‘for’ but‘with’ the groups and families’’ in question (Turner et al., 1963, p. 393). Governments should leavepeople to solve their own problems: at most they should ‘‘work along with [existing] forces,accepting existing values and priorities wherever these coincide with the logic and demands of thesituation.’’ (Turner, 1963, p. 377). The same was true for professionals, including architects suchas himself. Echoing these observations, a decade later Turner commented that it was because ofhis experiences in Peru that he ‘‘stopped trying to work for and started trying to work withpeople.’’ (original emphasis) (Turner, 1972a, p. 132). From this point of view public housing—that is, housing designed by architects and built for governmental agencies and rented to those inneed—was condemned not only for being hopelessly expensive but also for being ‘‘authoritarian.’’(Turner et al., 1963, p. 389; Turner, 1976b). Aided self-help, as it was practiced in the early 1960s,was certainly more affordable than public housing but, in Turner’s view, in terms of control it wasnot a great improvement. Typically, it required families to pay for a defined package of basicservices, and to accept fixed building standards, thereby depriving them of their capacity to makedecisions for themselves about what and how to build (Turner, 1972a). There is, then, in Turner’swork a singularity of purpose and outlook that has given it unusual coherence.

2.2. Reputation

The usual view of Turner’s work is that it was revolutionary not only in challenging, andchanging, established ways of thinking, but also in its effects on housing policy. He is seen as anoriginal, if not the founder of a new intellectual movement then at least the first among equals.Kosta Mathey, for example, judges Turner to be the most enthusiastic, ‘‘best known and mostoften quoted proponent of self-help housing’’, whose ideas were ‘‘taken up and idealized bynumerous other authors’’ (Mathey, 1991, pp. 380, 382). Betancur (1987, p. 287) speaks of ‘‘theTurner tradition’’, and Burgess (1977) of the ‘‘Turner school,’’ while Peattie and Doebele (1973,p. 67) refer to ‘‘Turner and a few of his colleagues.’’ When arguments in favour of self-help werechallenged, most notably in the 1980s, Mathey (1997, p. 283) noted that the ‘‘debate y becamepolarized around [Turner’s] writings.’’ All commentators recognize that during the 1960sthere were others besides Turner who were articulating the importance of self-help and squattersettlements. They acknowledge the importance of several contemporaries, notably WilliamMangin (Payne, 1977, p. 73; Dwyer, 1974, p. 199; Pugh, 1998, p. 91), and also Charles Abrams,Aprodicio Laquian, and Charles Stokes (Choguill, 1995, pp. 404–405; Gilbert, 1992, p. 117; Potter& Lloyd-Evans, 1998, pp. 146–147; van der Linden, 1986, p. 19). But almost without exceptionthey indicate that, as Drakakis-Smith (1981, p. 65) has put it, Turner was ‘‘one of the first to urgea revision of attitudes and policies’’ regarding self-help, and as a result was ‘‘particularlyprominent.’’ Ward’s judgement, part of his preface to the book that Turner wrote for the 1976

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Habitat conference, is typical: ‘‘more perhaps than anyone else, [Turner] has changed the way weperceive such [squatter] settlements’’ (Ward, 1976, p. 5).

Among those who have emphasized Turner’s originality, just a few have emphasized hisarguments about the importance of control over the building process. Among these are Rodell andSkinner. They suggest that it was Abrams, together with the German-born planner OttoKoenigsberger, who ‘‘formulated’’ the idea of ‘‘land-and-utilities’’ schemes in a series of reportsprepared for the United Nations between 1955 and 1963 (Rodell & Skinner, 1983, p. 7). This ideaemphasized the provision by the government of basic services, while the main role for families wasto reduce costs by investing sweat equity. In this context, Rodell and Skinner (1983, p. 12) claimthat Turner’s contribution was to emphasize the importance of ‘‘families making decisions,’’producing a ‘‘second and distinct model’’ of government-assisted self-help. Implicitly Rod Burgess,Turner’s most systematic critic, agrees with this view. He notes that control rather than self-help, inthe narrow sense of sweat equity, is at the centre of Turner’s argument (Burgess, 1978, p. 1117).Like Rodell and Skinner, he sees Turner as an original, but one who extended a tradition. But thisway of conceptualizing the novelty of Turner’s work is the exception, not the rule.

Turner’s reputation is not merely that of an original thinker but an iconoclast—a term that hehas used to describe himself (Turner, 1980, p. 40). From a traditional, left wing point of view, hisideas are entirely consistent with the status quo. He speaks most eloquently of encouraging peopleto manage with what they have, however little that might be, and his arguments have beenchallenged by left-wing critics on these grounds (e.g. Burgess, 1977, 1978). In the context of urbantheory, however, Turner is thought to have pioneered a new way of thinking. The point was madeearly on by Peattie and Doebele (1973, p. 67), who labelled Turner’s approach as ‘‘radical, since itpresses for a fundamental reorganization of almost all the existing institutions that surround theproduction of housing.’’ They added that ‘‘it may be one of the most original contributions tothought about housingy to have appeared in a long time’’ (Peattie & Doebele, 1973, p. 67).Aprodicio Laquian, who himself had developed similar arguments from his experience inIndonesia, agreed with this judgment, suggesting that Turner’s ideas ‘‘shook advocates ofconventional housing’’ (Laquian, 1969, 1977, p. 292). Later, Geoffrey Payne (1984, p. 2)commented that Turner helped to lay the ‘‘conceptual foundation [of]y a new housing strategy’’by demonstrating that ‘‘people were the best judge of what housing they needed.’’ Turner’s ideasare supposed to have been revolutionary not only in principle but also in their impact on academicthinking. As early as 1974, Dwyer (1974, p. 199) suggested that, as a result of the work of Turnerand Mangin, ‘‘planning attitudes towards spontaneous settlements have undergone a largemeasure of revision during the last decade.’’ Payne (1977, p. 73) agreed, suggesting that these twohad ‘‘achieved a revolution of attitudes’’ regarding the rationality and value of spontaneoussettlements. With lengthening hindsight, Conway (1985, pp. 171, 175) later claimed that ifattitudes towards squatter settlements changed ‘‘rather dramatically’’ it was ‘‘largely’’ because of‘‘the persuasiveness ofy John F.C. Turner,’’ while Van der Linden (1986, p. 19) spoke of a ‘‘waveof new thinking’’ that Turner’s work, in particular, had triggered. By 1987, designated by the UNas International Year of Shelter for the Homeless, the conventional wisdom on Turner’s influencewas well established. In his contribution to a larger reassessment of housing and settlementproblems in the developing world, Schon (1987, p. 364) confirmed that by the late 1960s peoplewere beginning to look at squatter settlements in a ‘‘new way.’’ This, he stated, was ‘‘very much asa result of the influence of John Turner’s work in Peru.’’

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The revolution in thinking became important when it extended beyond the academy. By 1973the World Bank was beginning to provide loans for housing projects, and initially they favouredsite-and-service schemes that mandated self-help. Turner himself expressed reservations aboutthese structured schemes, but they have usually been regarded as a significant concession towardsthe point of view that he had been expressing. Thus Schon (1987, p. 361), for example, commentsthat ‘‘out of Turner’s work in Peruy the idea of sites-and-services projects emerged.’’ Theconnection with policy was recognized very quickly. In 1973, Peattie and Doebele (1973, p. 67)observed that ‘‘five years ago the housing policies of almost all developing nations were to aconsiderable extent devoted to the furnishing of low-cost, completed units as a solution to thehousing of the poor.’’ They then claim that ‘‘Turner and his colleagues’’ had ‘‘played a major rolein the substitution of new and more flexible policies of ‘‘site-and-services’’ which are increasinglymajor parts of national policy around the world’’ (Peattie & Doebele, 1973, p. 67). Going onefurther, Conway (1985, p. 178) describes Turner’s role as ‘‘pivotal.’’ In 1976 the United Nationsheld a Habitat conference in Vancouver, reorganized its housing activities under a Centre forHuman Settlements, and endorsed a housing programme that emphasized self-help. According toMathey (1991, p. 382), among others, this programme was ‘‘influenced strongly’’ by Turner (cf.Ward, 1976, p. 5).

Recently, a telling endorsement of Turner’s reputation has come from Kenneth Watts. ABritish-trained planner, Watts was associated with the United Nations from 1951 to 1971, first asa consultant in Singapore and Indonesia, and then, working under Ernest Weissman, at theagency’s Housing, Building, and Planning head office in New York. He had contact with Turnerin Peru, and followed his subsequent career. In 1964, Weissman hired Turner as a consultant toprepare a report on squatter settlements, and in correspondence Watts described Turner as a ‘‘firstclass man, doing an excellent job in Lima.’’3 In a recent memoir, Watts has reflected on thisperiod, and Turner’s influence. He suggests that Turner played a key role in the ‘‘large-scalereorientation of shelter programmes, away from slum clearance to the environmentalimprovement of squatter settlements; away from a policy of government-provided housingyand towards the setting-up of policies to assist individuals to solve their own problems’’ (Watts,1997, p. 137). Watts, who was well placed to make such a judgement, endorses Turner’sreputation as a visionary and indeed, within limits, as a revolutionary influence. How accurate isthis view?

3. The originality of Turner’s ideas

There are several strands to Turner’s argument about self-help housing, and in order to assessthe originality of his ideas we need to distinguish their elements. Three are of fundamentalimportance: first, the basic idea that self-help has value, especially but not only as a method ofhousing the poor; second, the related notion that governments should assist owner-builders; andthird, the favourable assessment of squatter settlements as solutions rather than problems,coupled with a faith in the rationality of the poor.

3Letter to W. Woodhouse, Head, Tropical Division, Building Research Station, DSIRO, Watford, England, 11

August 1964. (UNA, RAG 3/9-52 SO 144 (16).)

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3.1. The value of self-help

Turner recognizes that self-help is valuable in a variety of ways. It not only helps families toreduce housing costs but also ensures that their dwellings will best fit their needs andcircumstances. There was nothing new to the economic aspect of this argument. Even beforeCharles Abrams and Otto Koenigsberger, many writers had made the same point. The mostimportant of these was Jacob Crane, the American planner who actually coined the phrase ‘‘aidedself-help’’ (Harris, 1997). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Crane was in charge of theinternational housing office of the US Housing and Home Finance Agency. He wrote a series ofpapers in which he pointed out that, in the developing world, most families could acquirehomes only by building their own, and that the most cost-effective way for governments and aidagencies to improve the housing conditions was to assist this process (Crane, 1944, p. 21, 1949,pp. 101–102, 1950, p. 18). Especially in his early writings on self-help, Crane highlighted thesavings that could be realized though ‘‘the hard labor of many a home seeker’s own hands.’’(Crane & Paxton, 1951, p. 41). The same point was acknowledged by many others, for exampleG. A. Atkinson, who from 1948 was housing advisor to the British Colonial Office (Atkinson,1952, 1961; Harris & Giles, 2003).

Economic arguments in favour of self-help were incorporated into the institutional wisdom ofmost of the leading international agencies. During the 1950s, reports of the UN, the ILO, and thePan American Union routinely endorse this point of view, usually as a justification for policies ofassistance to owner-builders (ILO, 1953, p. 174; Pan-American Union, 1953, pp. 55–58; USHHFA, 1954; UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1957, p. 24; UN EcoSoc., 1961,pp. 316–319). Even the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) inits first country report acknowledged the economic importance of self-help for housing inColombia (IBRD, 1950, pp. 537–539). By the early 1960s the economic benefits of self-help werepart of conventional wisdom (e.g. Frieden, 1965). They were taken for granted by many of thecontributors to the collection written for a US Senate subcommittee in 1963. Apart from Doxiadisand Abrams, these included George Speer and Donald Hanson, two of Crane’s ex-colleaguesfrom the HHFA, as well as the veteran analyst of American real estate, Homer Hoyt (Abrams,1963; Hanson, 1963; Hoyt, 1963; Doxiadis, 1963, p. 308; Speer, 1963). There was little new to besaid on this issue.

More novel were Turner’s argument about the importance of control over the building process,and for the ways in which self-help created settlements that better suited the needs of theiroccupants. On this issue, too, however, Crane had already had something to say. In the last coupleof years of his professional career with the HHFA, before he retired in 1953, Crane extended hisarguments about self-help beyond narrowly economic considerations. In a piece that he wrotewith a colleague for a conference at MIT in 1953, he attacked the prevailing forms of paternalisticthinking about housing. He spoke of the ‘‘misconceptiony that only architects and members ofallied professions can deal intelligently with housing’’ and argued that ‘‘there is a tendencyy tothink far too much in terms of what the professionals think the people should do—a tendency toplan for the people.’’ (Crane & Foster, 1955, p. 136). Crane obviously liked this way of puttingthings. In a document that he had prepared two years earlier in 1951 for the newsletter of theInternational Federation of Housing and Town Planning, he had asserted that there was a needfor a ‘‘new type of planner-doery He does not plan for the people, but helps them to plan and act

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for themselves’’ (original emphasis) (Crane, 1951, p. 6). The phrasing anticipates Turner’semphasis on planning with not for the poor. Crane claimed that such planners needed to ‘‘tap therich but unrealized potentials of the people themselves. They know how to do many things, else somany of them could not manage to survive’’ (Crane & Foster, 1955, p. 137). Crane, too, viewedself-help as part of a process of community development, requiring and encouraging cooperation.In a locution that is reminiscent of Turner’s ‘‘housing as a verb’’ Crane and Foster (1955, p. 137)recognized cooperation as not just a noun but ‘‘also an adjective.’’

Crane did not go as far as Turner. He did not focus his argument on the issue of control asrigorously, and he did not pursue its ramifications as far. Even in his later writings he saw self-helpas a method that was necessary in the short, and perhaps in the medium term, but which theprocesses of economic development should eventually transcend. He was not so wholly convincedof its intrinsic worth. But, partly because of their common debt to Patrick Geddes, Crane andTurner clearly thought on closely parallel tracks. Turner must have owed something to Crane.The two did meet, and Turner developed his thinking in a context where ‘‘aided self-help’’,Crane’s term, was part of everyday discourse among housing professionals. But Turner did notdraw direct inspiration from Crane’s ideas (Turner, 2000). He did not read any of Crane’s writingson the subject of self-help, and had few opportunities to learn of them indirectly. In the politicaland professional climate of the early 1950s, Crane’s ideas found little resonance. John Burchard,an advocate of industrial housing and a discussant at the MIT conference, misrepresented Cranewhile dismissing his argument out of hand. ‘‘Mr. Crane’’, Burchard (1955, p. 157) claimed, ‘‘wrotewith brio about houses which cost nothing because people would build them out of palm leaves intheir spare time.’’ By the late-1950s, very few people cited Crane, and Turner would have had littleopportunity to encounter, critique, and develop Crane’s ideas. Instead, Turner built uponaccepted ideas concerning the value of self-help, reinvented others, and carried the discussion to anew level. There was certainly something new here, but not as much as many people, probablyincluding Turner himself, have supposed.

3.2. Assistance for self-help

Just as Turner was not the first to recognize the value of self-help so, too, he followed others inarguing that governments should support it. He acknowledged that Patrick Geddes had endorsedassisted self-help as early as 1918 and by the late 1950s variations of this argument were in generalcurrency. Crane had been its strongest advocate, but Abrams (1964), Atkinson (1952, 1961),Weissman (1960), and many others had all recommended some version. So, too, had majorinternational agencies, including the British Colonial Office, the UN, the ILO, the Pan AmericanUnion, and the international housing office of the US Housing and Home Finance Agency(Harris & Giles, 2003). More to the point, the policy had been widely adopted. In 1951, Crane andPaxton’s (1951) survey showed that aided self-help was being supported in quite a number ofcountries scattered around the world. In the late 1950s, Weissman’s office at the UN undertook amore systematic survey of national governments. It found a widespread sense of disillusionmentwith public housing, and correspondingly wide support for assisted self-help. Identifying specificprograms in places as diverse as Gorki, Morocco, Indonesia, Madrid, Chile, the Belgian Congo,and Guatemala, the survey report identified aided self-help as ‘‘one of the most hopeful means ofstretching the limited public resources’’ (UN EcoSoc, 1959a, p. 42). A parallel ILO report,

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published in the same year, featured programs in Greece, India, Taiwan, and Puerto Rico (ILO,1959). Indeed, its authors identified a ‘‘fairly well-established policy trendy to give a higherpriority immediately to housing built from short-life materials, utilizing aided self-help andmutual aid methods.’’ Here, then, is strong support for the claims of Weissman (1960, 1978) andCrooke (1974) that versions of aided self-help had become standard by the late 1950s.

Support for owner-builders was most actively promoted in Puerto Rico, among the Britishcolonies, and in Latin America (Harris, 1998, pp. 178–184). In each case, the availability ofwestern financial assistance was critical. The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico was a special case inalmost every way. It qualified for the same sorts of housing assistance as did American states, buteconomic and social conditions made it comparable with other Caribbean and Latin Americancountries. Beginning in 1939, it began to develop a variety of types of aided self-help housingprogrammes in both rural and urban areas. By the 1950s it had become the first jurisdiction in theworld to make self-help a central element in its overall housing policy (Harris, 1998, pp. 167–169).Indeed, by the late 1950s this type of policy had come to overshadow all others. In 1958, thePuerto Rican Housing Authority established a blue chip advisory committee that includedCharles Abrams, Lloyd Rodwin, Ernest Weissman, Bill Reed (an ex-colleague of Crane’s), as wellas prominent local planners. At their first meeting this group spent much of its time discussingwhether aided self-help was the only viable method of building and rehabilitation on the island(Puerto Rico Housing Authority, 1958, pp. 5–9). The United States had touted the Puerto Ricanself-help schemes as a model, a fact that Turner acknowledged (Turner, 1972a, p. 128).

Because governmental agencies in Puerto Rico also built some conventional public housing,this island soon presented a variety of interesting experimental settings from which it was possibleto compare the merits of state projects, aided, and unaided self-help. In the early 1960s, severalstudies were undertaken and found that public housing was disliked by its occupants, not only forbeing too expensive but also for the regimentation and loss of control (Back, 1962, p. 107;Hollingshead & Rogler, 1963, pp. 240–241; Safa, 1964, p. 11). Implicitly or explicitly theyindicated that self-help, whether government-assisted or not, provided a variety of benefits (e.g.Back, 1962, pp. 106–107). Drawing upon this local experience, Charles Frankenhoff, at theUniversity of Puerto Rico, wrote of the social and psychological, as well as the economicadvantages of self-help, which in 1964 he claimed ‘‘seems to offer the best hope for a realbreakthrough in the Latin American housing problem’’ (Frankenhoff, 1964, p. 83; cf.Frankenhoff, 1967).

On a per capita basis, fewer funds were available for housing programs in the British coloniesand in the rest of Latin America. From 1940, monies for projects in the British colonies had beenmade available under the auspices of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act. Although thesesupported public housing at first, they were soon also being used for self-help schemes (UKInformation Service, 1960). In Latin America, the United States was the main source of funds,initially under the auspices of the Pan American Union and later through the Inter AmericanDevelopment Bank. Under Crane’s influence CINVA, a centre for housing research, wasestablished in Bogota in 1951, and an especially early self-help project was funded in Chile in 1953(National Planning Association, 1956, pp. 54, 64; cf. Housing problems and policies in LatinAmerica, 1952, pp. 364–365, 375). From the beginning, one of the main goals of CINVA wasto test methods of self-help construction, and to train field workers (Pan American Union, 1953,p. 124; P!erez, 1953). Within a decade it had trained dozens of people from across Latin America,

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and had acquired ‘‘many years of experience in self-help housing’’ (C.I.N.V.A., 1963). As itsdirector, and other contributors to the Senate collection mentioned in 1963, the centre was wellregarded as a source of self-help expertise in Latin America (Carlson, 1963, p. 316; Harris, 1963,p. 351; cf. Frankenhoff, 1964, pp. 84–85; Koth, Silva, & Dietz, 1965, pp. 57–61).

Encouraged by US-based agencies, by the late 1950s many Latin American countries wereexpressing interest in self-help schemes (Draft proposaly, 1960). The launch of the Alliance forProgress at Punta del Este, Uruguay, in September 1961 gave these a powerful new impetus.One of the 12 objectives of the Punta del Este Charter was ‘‘to increase the construction of lowcost houses for low incomes families.’’ (Gordon, 1963, p. 122). Lincoln Gordon, Americanambassador to Brazil, commented that aided self-help was the most effective means foraccomplishing this goal, and the Inter-American Development Bank (established in 1959)immediately began to frame policies that would support it (Gordon, 1963, p. 42). In the early1960s, more than half of the housing units that were financed in Latin America from the SocialProgress Trust Fund and administered by IADB were in self-help projects (Herrera, 1963, p. 440).By 1964, virtually every country in Latin America had included elements of self-help into housingpolicy (UN EcoSoc, 1964, p. 46; Koth, Silva, & Dietz, 1965, pp. 203–209).

Encouraged by the United States and the UN, Peru was among the first of the Latin Americancountries to develop programs of assistance to owner-builders. Significant funds were not madeavailable until the end of the 1950s, when the US government was eventually persuaded topromote home ownership through self-help, as part of a strategy for containing communism(Zoumanas, 1986). For at least a decade before then, however, it offered advice and technicalassistance. Under the Point 4 assistance program that was initiated by the United States in 1950,technical advisors were sent to dozens of countries, especially in Latin America. In 1952 theHHFA sent Wilson Longmore to Peru. At the time, Crane described Longmore as an expert with‘‘considerable experience and great interest in aided self-help shelter improvement principles.’’4 Itis not clear whether Longmore’s visit had much effect in official circles, although some tentativesteps were taken. By 1955, a group of Peruvian professionals, including Jos!e Matas Mar and JohnP. Cole, had established a ‘‘pilot technical assistance project’’ for squatters in Arequipa, thesecond-largest city in the country (Turner, 1972a, p. 123). At least one of these, architect EduardoNeira, undertook this as part of his work for the Ministry of Public Works.

In 1956 and again in 1958 the UN sent small housing missions to Peru with the purpose ofencouraging the government to invest in self-help. In April 1956, B.R. Hopenhayn, one of the twomembers of the first mission, was hosted by Alfredo Dammert, Member of the Board of Directorsof the National Housing Corporation, and Manuel Valega, General Manager. He was given atour of Lima neighborhoods, including a public rental project and a ‘‘clandestine’’ settlement.Concluding that ‘‘these people have the best of intentions and want to do things’’ (orig. emph.),Hopenhayn suggested that with a prospective change in government they would be in a positionto do so.5 Until 1958, however, self-help in the clandestine settlements was at best tolerated(Collier, 1976, pp. 59–60). In January of that year, an earthquake devastated Arequipa. At the

4Letter to Dr. Rafael Pico, Chairman, Puerto Rican Planning Board, Santurce, P.R., 2 July 1952 (NA, HUD, US

HHFA, Box 61, 407 ‘‘International Housing May 1 thru’’).5Letter to Mr. [Bruno] Lauschner, Chief, UN Office for Latin America, Programme Division, Gran Hotel, Lima, 22

April 1956. (UNA, RAG 2/330-40, SO 330/010 Peru.)

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time, the only document that John Turner had read that provided detailed suggestions on houseconstruction was one which was based on the Puerto Rican aided self-help projects (Turner,2000).6 Using this as a guide, he and some architectural colleagues proposed that thereconstruction of Arequipa should use aided self-help, on the grounds that this ‘‘would rehousethe greatest number with the available capital.’’ (Turner, 1959, p. 41). The project went ahead and,in his view, was enough of a success that discussion soon focussed on whether it might became amodel (Turner, 1959, p. 41).

New impetus was given to local discussions when, in 1958, Ernest Weissman paid a visit toArequipa. With his backing, pilot self-help projects were initiated in seven cities (Harris, Hosse, &Associates, 1963, p. 670; Per !u, 1958). In the same year, a Commission under Pedro Beltranprepared a report on housing that identified five basic policy goals. The first of these was ‘‘toprovide technical, social and financial assistance to low-income groups who can construct theirdwellings themselves or otherwise contribute directly to the provision of a home.’’ (Per !u, 1959).Two years later, support for pilot projects was supplemented by Law 13517, which made thepromotion of self-help a matter of general policy (Collier, 1976, pp. 84–85). Ricardo Valega, ofthe Corporaci !on Nacional de la Vivienda, initiated some sites and minimal services schemes(Turner, 2000). In such a sympathetic climate of opinion, the IADB played a large role. As Turner(1963, p. 375) noted, the bank cooperated with the new law by funding water and drainageprojects. In 1961 and 1962, it assisted 30,000 self-help dwelling units in Peru, more than any otherLatin American country except Venezuela (Herrera, 1963, p. 442). Soon, under the auspices of theUS Agency for International Development, many more were planned (United States. Agency forInternational Development (USAID), 1963, pp. 415–416).

When he arrived in Peru in 1957, then, Turner found himself in a situation where extensiveexperimentation with aided self-help was about to get under way. He was in an excellent positionto observe and judge the potential of such projects. His first impressions were favourable,although qualified on a number of technical issues. These included the dispersion of building sites,of which he disapproved, the problems of bureaucratic delays and inconsistencies, and themisguided encouragement of families to build ‘‘provisional’’ dwellings rather than to start smalland make extensions (Turner, 1959, pp. 35, 40, 42, 48, 51). He was given the opportunity toupdate his views in print in 1963, after a report on Lima’s barriadas, written by James (later Jan)Morris, was published in the Sunday Times and had attracted interest from the editor ofArchitectural Design (Turner, 1963, 2000; Turner et al., 1963). His assessment, which was mostfully articulated a decade later, remained sympathetic but became more sharply critical of theexcessive controls exerted by agency managers (Turner, 1972a). In making the case for a looserform of assisted self-help he knew that he was developing a major variation on an establishedtheme. It was left for later commentators to make unqualified claims for his originality. The largerirony is that the sites-and-service schemes that were developed in the 1970s, supposedly underTurner’s influence, offered settlers no more autonomy than those that he had already encounteredin Peru. He was then praised for inspiring a type of program of which he had become sharplycritical!

6 It is likely that the guide in question was the one prepared by Keith Hinchcliff (1961) under the auspices of the

Technical Cooperation Administration in Mexico City.

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3.3. Squatter settlements and the rationality of the poor

In the 1960s, nothing struck readers of Turner and Mangin more forcefully than the idea thatsquatter settlements were not the problem but a large part of the solution. The argument was thatsuch settlements were not only well adapted to the needs and circumstances of their residents, butwere also typically improved over time. It is not clear where the latter idea came from. It was mostmemorably captured by Stokes (1963) in his phrase ‘‘slums of hope,’’ a fact that a number ofcontemporaries acknowledged (Casasco, 1969; Portes, 1972, p. 175). In the report oninternational squatter settlements that he prepared in 1965–1966 for the United Nations, Turnerrefers to Stokes’ work, but it is not clear at what point he became aware of it (Turner, 1968a).Stokes himself noted, however, that his ideas had developed as an attempt to explain the earlierobservations of Robert Lampman, and it seems likely that such ideas were circulating generally inthe early 1960s, especially in Latin America (Stokes, 1963, p. 188, n. 2). In Peru in 1959, J. MatasMar had prepared a report on rural migrants in the barriadas of Lima. It expressed someambivalence about these settlements, viewing them in part as a ‘‘problem’’ but also emphasizingthe positive, cooperative spirit in which they had been created (Matas Mar, 1961, p. 182). Twoyears later, the author of a study of mental health problems in the capital was very careful todistinguish the problematic ‘‘slum’’ areas from the thriving ‘‘marginal quarters’’ described byMatas Mar (Rotondo, 1961, p. 250). Relying only on the English-language literature, it is perhapsimpossible to reconstruct exactly where and when local intellectuals first began to think positivelyabout squatter settlements. From what we know, however, it appears that both Stokes and Turnerwere bringing to the attention of an international audience a distinction that many locals alreadyacknowledged. If so, however, it does seem that the idea was quite fresh.

Turner’s favourable view of the squatter settlements depended in large part upon his faith in therationality of the poor. He assumed that people were the best judge of their own needs, and thatthe settlements they created were likely to best meet those needs. It went without saying thatattempts to destroy and replace such settlements, for example through programs of ‘urbanrenewal’, should be condemned and resisted. This went against mainstream urban policy in the1960s, but by the early years of that decade there were a number of influential writers who werearticulating this point of view. In Britain, Young and Wilmott (1957) had documented the richsocial life of a working class ‘slum’ in London’s east end. In the United States, Herbert Gans(1962) did something similar for Boston’s West End, defending the neighbourhood against thosewho sought to destroy it through urban renewal. Similar ethnographic studies soon followed(Liebow, 1967; Suttles, 1968). While Gans was in Boston, Marris (1962) was undertaking acomparable study of redevelopment in Lagos, Nigeria, and researchers in Puerto Rico werediscovering, and then explaining why ‘‘most slum dwellers like their neighbourhoods’’ while‘‘most dwellers in public housing dislike theirs’’ (Hollingshead & Rogler, 1963, p. 243). Amongwestern academics, a powerful critique of urban planning rapidly gathered momentum in the1960s. Anticipated by Jacobs (1961), it articulated the functional aspects of the communities thatplanners and politicians liked to label slums. By focussing upon the urban fringe rather than theinner city, Turner and Mangin added a new dimension to this growing body of work, but theirpremises and purposes were in close accord with this emerging consensus.

Here, again, it is reasonable to ask whether western academics were not sometimes followingrather than leading. While, for a time, it was possible to implement ambitious housing and urban

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renewal schemes in the developed world, in poorer countries the difficulties made themselves feltmuch sooner. In Delhi, by the late 1950s the government’s attempts at urban renewal had run intoresistance and had engendered a growing recognition that low-income communities had intrinsicvalue (Clinard, 1966). At the same time in Port-of-Spain, the Trinidadian writer Naipaul usedvignettes to portray the residents of a fictional Miguel Street. In the introduction to one of thesevignettes he observes that ‘‘a stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say ‘Slum!’because he could see no more. But we who lived there saw our street as a worldy’’ (Naipaul,1959, p. 79). These straws in the wind suggest that from an early date, in the developing world,some politicians, planners, and intellectuals had been sympathetic to the idea that settlements ofthe poor were communities and deserved respect. Turner oriented himself with this local point ofview in Peru, and in so doing joined a growing number of western professionals. He was attunedto currents of thinking that were characteristic of his day.

4. Patronage and reception

It is because Turner was a man of his times that he received the patronage of Ernest Weissmanat the United Nations. Weissman had been in charge of the Housing, Building and Planningbranch at the United Nations since 1951. In the early 1950s, Crane pressed Weissman to promotethe idea of aided self-help and by the late 1950s Weissman’s office consistently did so. In 1958 itembarked on a survey of government attitudes towards aided self-help, undertook an evaluationof self-help methods, and established these as central to its new ‘‘long-range programme’’ ofresearch and action on low-cost housing (UN. EcoSoc, 1959b). It was in the context of the UN’sgrowing interest in self-help housing that Weissman met Turner in Arequipa when he paid anofficial visit to Peru in 1958. After Weissman had returned to New York, Turner wrote to inquirewhether the UN would be willing to sponsor a case study of self-help in Arequipa.7 The agreementfor Turner’s consultancy that was drafted by Weissman’s office makes it clear that his proposalwas accepted because it fitted the UN’s priorities. The Arequipa report was identified as ‘‘one of aseriesy to be prepared in line with the recommendations for the ‘long range programmey’’’8

Weissman made it clear to Turner that the report would have to fit the needs of the UN’s researchprogramme, and it was at his urging that Turner eventually agreed to devote ‘‘40–50%’’ of thefinal report to the local ‘‘Experience in Directed Self-Help Building.’’9

It was the UN’s continuing interest in self-help housing that prompted Weissman to approachTurner to write another report, in 1964. This was to prove a more significant project, for itproduced a major study of international squatter settlements. According to Peter Ward (1976,p. 5) this study ‘‘was most influential in setting in motion governmental ‘site-and-services’ housing

7Ernest Weissman, Letter to John F.C. Turner, 31 December 1958. (UNA, RAG 3/9-37 SO 144 (3-2) Peru. Self-Help

Housing, Peru.)8 ‘‘Preparation of the Report on Housing in Arequipa, Peru,’’ Special Service Agreement. Typescript, April 1959.

(UNA, RAG 3/9-37 SO 144 (3-2) Peru. Self-Help Housing. Peru.)9Weissman to Turner, 18 March 1959; John F.C. Turner, ‘‘Expanded outline for the Report on Housing in Arequipa,

Peru,’’ 25 April 1959, Typescript. Weissman responded that he was ‘‘pleased’’ to see that Turner was going to devote

much of the report to a consideration of government policy. Weissman to Turner, 13 May 1959. (UNA, RAG 3/9-37

SO 144 (3-2) Peru. Self-Help Housing. Peru.)

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programmesy’’ Turner himself agrees broadly with this assessment of its impact (Turner, 1995).In early correspondence, Weissman defined this project as a study of ‘‘Housing and PlanningStandards for the Resettlement of Squatters.’’10 He identified its main purpose as determining‘‘how the worst features of the squatter problem can be eliminated so that ‘squatter’ areas couldbecome an integral part of urban development’’ (see footnote 10). To this end, Turner was askedto pay particular attention to current building standards, which Weissman suggested were ‘‘toostringent’’ (see footnote 10). In Turner’s hands the emphasis of the project shifted. In particular,the final report spoke of the ways in which squatter settlements were already integral to urbandevelopment. But its focus, and many of its key lines of argument, most notably the critique ofbuilding standards, was established by Weissman at the outset. Of course, Turner was much morethan a hired hand. Weissman had approached him because he was acquiring a reputation in thefield, and doubtless Weissman framed his request in terms to which he knew Turner couldeffectively respond. Even so, it is clear that Turner’s contribution to the report on squattersettlements was in line with the thinking of experts at the United Nations, and indeed otherinternational agencies.

Perhaps the clearest indication of how Turner’s ideas compared with those of hiscontemporaries may be found by considering the way in which the report on squatter settlementswas first received. If its ideas were as revolutionary as many have suggested then we might expectit to have met with opposition, of the sort that greeted Jacob Crane at the MIT conference in1953. In fact, the reception ranged from warm to enthusiastic. Judging from availablecorrespondence in the UN archives, no one in Weissman’s office disagreed with any of themain lines of Turner’s argument. When the report was forwarded up the UN hierarchy, MarshallWolfe, Director of the Division of Social Affairs, praised it as ‘‘valuable and original’’ but thenqualified this by indicating that ‘‘it is in substantial agreement with our own observations.’’11 Thereport was first unveiled in public at an interregional seminar in Pittsburgh in October–Novemberof 1966. A summary of this meeting, later prepared for the Committee on Housing, Building andPlanning, indicates the response of those present. It notes that the report on squatter settlements‘‘drew considerable attention’’, especially because of the way that it viewed such settlements aspart of ‘‘a normal process of growth’’ (UN EcoSoc, 1967, p. 4). The report’s emphasis on the needto support ‘‘self-improvement’’ generated ‘‘widespread interest and enthusiasm’’ from thosepresent, coupled with a ‘‘common understanding’’ that researchers and governments mustapproach the whole issue in a more realistic manner than hitherto (UN EcoSoc, 1967, p. 7). Thereis no record of a dissenting voice.

This account of the meeting in Pittsburgh, and the report itself, were considered in 1967 by theCommittee on Housing, Building, and Planning. This international committee, which had usuallymet only once a year, was a large advisory group that included national representatives(Weissman, 1978). A summary of the committee’s deliberations observes that ‘‘several membersy indicated that their Governments [sic] had already decided that the best approach to theproblem was to give the maximum help to inhabitants concerned, on the principle of self-help andgradual improvement.’’ (UN EcoSoc, 1968). Here, in Pittsburgh, and in the corridors at UN

10Weissman to Turner, 5 May 1964. ([UNA, RAG 3/9-52 SO 144 (16)).11Letter to Donald McGranahan, Assistant Director, Survey, Research and Development Branch, Bureau of Social

Affairs, UN, 5 July 1966. (UNA, RAG 3/9-52 SO 144 (16)).

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Headquarters, there is a sense that Turner was preaching to the converted, or at the very least tothose who wanted to believe. His arguments were easily incorporated into the agency’s establishedarguments and discourse, which for almost two decades had endorsed ‘aided self-help’ (Harris &Giles, 2003). In 1967 a UN report on the social aspects of housing, written by Elizabeth Wood,made reference to the Peruvian experience and in other respects too shows the influence of Turner(UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1967). These are blended seamlessly with theusual endorsement of ‘aided self-help.’ Justified by a wide array of examples from around theworld, the same comfortable blend of old and new argument is apparent for several years. A goodexample is the report of a major interregional seminar on the subject of ‘‘slums and uncontrolledsettlements’’, held in Medellin, Colombia, in February 1970. It cites Turner, hints at Stokes’influence in its distinction between ‘‘open end’’ and ‘‘dead end’’ slums, and praises a recentColombian scheme as a model of ‘‘aided self-help housing’’, the type of policy that othergovernments were encouraged to adopt (UN Department of Social and Economic Affairs, 1971,p. 64, n. 20, 149, 151). This looks like an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, development inthinking.

Weissman, of course, had commissioned the squatter report from Turner, so we should not besurprised that it was well received at UN-sponsored meetings and within the agency itself.What is perhaps more significant is that it was also readily accepted by other contemporaries.Indeed, those who had experience in the field easily brought it into their discourse. Oram is a goodcase in point. Oram had served as an administrator in East Africa from 1948–1960, where hebecame familiar with many of the self-help housing programmes that were being developed underBritish rule at that time (Oram, 1965, pp. 65–66). In 1960 he was moved to New Guinea where hebecame responsible for an aided self-help scheme in Port Moresby. His published report on thisscheme cites a number of precedents, including a project in Khartoum in the early 1950s and alsothe Report of the East African Royal Commission of 1955 (Oram, 1971). A reference to Turner,and others to Stokes and Abrams, is woven into an account which views aided self-help in the1960s as part of a growing tradition.12 Turner’s ideas are treated in much the same way byNorwood, an administrator with post-independence experience in East Africa, in a case study ofBlantyre, Malawi (Norwood, 1975). Above all for those with field experience, Turner’s ideas werenot so much a challenge as new justification for what they had long been doing (cf. Muench &Muench, 1968).

5. Discussion

Turner built an extension to pre-existing arguments about the importance of self-help in housebuilding, and he was one of a number of writers who were articulating the value of low-incomecommunities. For the most part he did not claim to be making novel arguments. How, then, didhe earn his reputation as an original champion of self-help and squatter settlements? Heresponded quite critically to the established, structured programmes of aided self-help. How can

12Elsewhere, Oram (1979, p. 43) suggested that the innovations in self-help pioneered in East Africa were later lost. In

fact, East Africa was not the birthplace of these innovations and, although the East African projects may soon have

been largely forgotten, the larger tradition continued (Harris & Giles, 2001).

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we explain the irony that he came to be regarded as the father of equally structured site-and-service schemes? His ideas were accepted by his colleagues without demur. How, then, did theycome to be viewed as revolutionary?

One of the reasons why Turner came to be regarded as such an original is that he himself didnot trace the genealogy of his arguments. He mentioned Geddes and Abrams, but not Crane. Hecritiqued Peruvian programs of aided self-help, but never gave sustained attention to the richer,because longer and more diverse, experience of Puerto Rico. He was concerned to make aplausible case. For this purpose Peru offered ample scope, while for many years he was not in agood position to document or survey what was happening elsewhere. Indeed, he may even havehad a disincentive to do so. The squatter movement in Peru depended to an unusual extent onorganized, group invasions, and lent itself well to Turner’s emphasis on the capacity of squattersto solve virtually all of their own problems, with little or no assistance from the state (cf. Leeds &Leeds, 1976; Morse, 1965, p. 55; Rogler, 1967). Squatter settlements elsewhere did not fit hispolicy recommendations quite as well (Alsayyad, 1993).

Turner’s neglect of precedents reflected an ignorance of what was happening elsewhere.In the fall of 2000 he recalled that ‘‘I read very little academic literature before 1965,’’ and addedthat ‘‘I was totally absorbed by the practicalities and with very limited access to—or evenawareness of—relevant literature’’ (Turner, 2000). For most of the years that he spent in Peru hewas a not part of the (admittedly limited) network within which ideas about self-help were beingdiscussed. During the course of correspondence with Turner in 1958–1959, for example,Weissman alluded to the forthcoming meetings of the International Federation of Housing andTown Planning.13 This was a group of academics and practitioners that had been meetingregularly since the early years of the century, and for whose newsletter Crane had written aboutself-help in 1951. In 1960 their meetings were to be held in Puerto Rico where, appropriately, self-help was to be one of the two main subjects of discussion (Cabrera, 1961). In his reply toWeissman, Turner expressed interest in the conference, but made it clear that he had not heard ofthe organization.14

Isolated from such networks, Turner was apparently unaware of Crane’s work. He was also notin a position to know much of what was happening outside of Peru, and certainly Latin America.When Weissman originally commissioned the report on squatter settlements, he expected there tobe several background documents, one for each region of the world. Turner was to survey theLatin American scene and prepare the general report. In the end, it proved difficult to locatepeople who were able and willing to write other regional reports. The final document was mostlythe work of Turner and of Weissman’s office, both drawing upon international correspondents.While Turner was preparing the first draft he called upon the assistance of UN staff to supplymaterials that he had not seen. The most important of these was the Senate-sponsored survey of1963.15 Significantly, when he submitted a draft of the report in 1965, Weissman’s response wasmixed. He liked the ideas but noted omissions. He complained that ‘‘there is still a fair amount offactual information and many experiences available for other countries that could have been

13Weissman to Turner, 18 March 1959. (UNA, 3/9-37 SO 144(3-2) Peru. Self-Help Housing. Peru #2.)14Turner to Weissman, 25 April 1959. (UNA, 3/9-37 SO 144(3-2) Peru. Self-Help Housing. Peru #2.)15Letter to Wilson Garces, Housing Branch, UN, 29 January 1965; Garces, Letter to Turner, 4 February 1965.

(UNA, RAG 3/9-30. SO 144 (16). Peru. Self-Help Housing. Peru.)

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incorporated into the report.’’16 Turner, apparently miffed, responded that ‘‘perhaps I was unwiseto have taken on [the project] in the first place,’’ although much later he observed that he was‘‘forever grateful’’ to Weissman for encouraging him to generalize his arguments beyond Peru(Turner, 1978, p. 1142).17 Weissman’s office added references and examples into the final report.These probably did not alter, in any important way, the sense of what is now usually thought of asTurner’s paper. But they may have shifted the emphasis and certainly gave it weight.18 In thismanner, the UN lent authority to what appeared to many observers to be a wholly novel line ofargument.

It was not until the 1970s, however, that Turner’s reputation began to acquire mythicdimensions. Several influences seem to have been at work. The first and most basic is that heremained active in making his case. He was strongly convinced of the importance and merits of hisargument, and was prepared to champion its cause for years as a consultant to the UN and laterthe World Bank, at conferences, through correspondence, and in print. The second is that hedeveloped further the practical and theoretical ramifications of his argument. He made explicit thegeographical aspects of his initial insight into squatter settlements and slums, linking these withthe processes of rural–urban migration and the social geography of the city (Turner, 1967, 1968b;cf. Harris & Wahba, 2002; Lowder, 1986, pp. 229–234). He drew parallels between experience inthe developing and the developed worlds (Turner & Fichter, 1972). He grounded his arguments ina version of anarchist philosophy (Turner, 1976a). He defended his argument against those whoidentified him as the leading proponent of self-help (Turner, 1978). Increasingly, he builtconnections between housing and community development. His arguments touched a growingnumber of issues in a wide variety of settings. More than any specific argument—about theimportance of self-help, or of squatter settlements—I would argue that it is the breadth andconsistency of Turner’s thinking that accounts for his influence. Indeed, Turner’s capacity todevelop a broad and compelling synthesis may be his most original contribution to the way wethink about housing.

No matter how powerful his ideas, and regardless of how energetically he tried to communicatethem, Turner would not have acquired much of a reputation if he had not been living at the righttime. Western critics of public housing, urban renewal, and modernist visions of urbandevelopment were growing rapidly in number during the 1960s, and eventually in influence. Onthe domestic front, in many industrialized countries, they were able to stop urban expresswaysand renewal projects, and then in the 1970s to initiate new types of housing programmes. At theinternational level the parallel development, occurring at almost exactly the same time, came withthe World Bank’s endorsement of an urban strategy of site-and-services. It may be that Turner’s

16Weissman to Turner, 1 June 1965. (UNA, 3/9-37 SO 144(3-2) Peru. Self-Help Housing. Peru #2.)17Turner to Weissman, 9 June 1965. (UNA, 3/9-37 SO 144(3-2) Peru. Self-Help Housing. Peru #2.)18Several versions of the final report were (re)printed, circulated, and gained influence. A version published by the

UN itself concludes with a strong endorsement of aided self-help (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs,

1968, p. 127). The version published in a book edited by Gerald Breese does not, and indeed ends rather abruptly

(Turner, 1968a, b). Significantly, Turner’s status on these publications is defined differently. In the first, his identity as

author is made clear only in a footnote, and even then only as being responsible for the ‘‘original paper.’’ In the second

he is listed more conventionally as the author, though ostensibly writing ‘‘for United Nations, Center for Housing,

Building and Planning.’’ Such differences imply that one statement was the institutional view, while the other was more

personal. Whether contemporaries noted such distinctions is unclear.

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ideas played a part in bringing about this shift. It is surely also true that this shift played a largepart in making his reputation. The fact that such a powerful agency threw its weight behind theidea of self-help gave it new significance. That it had not done so before seemed to imply that theidea itself was new. Since, by the early 1970s, Turner was the most prolific and committedadvocate of self-help, it seemed reasonable that he should be given the intellectual credit.

This brings us to the ironic aspect of Turner’s reputation. In fact, there is a double irony. Thefirst is that the aspect of his argument that was most original, namely his emphasis on dwellingcontrol, is the one that was least influential. This aspect has only rarely been discussed by thosewho have written about housing policy in the developing world, and it has not been embodied toany significant degree in the recommendations and policies of international agencies. The second,and related, irony is that Turner is credited with bringing into being site-and-service projects ofwhich he himself was, from the very beginning, quite skeptical. Perhaps it makes sense to frameTurner as an advocate of aided self-help if we assume, as most writers have, that public housingwas the dominant form of housing programme in the developing world through the late 1960s.Sites-and-services can then be plausibly be interpreted as a step in the direction of the sort ofautonomous self-help in which Turner believed, a compromise that he helped to win. In fact,however, although public housing was for many years advocated in much of the industrializedworld, this was not true in the developing world (Harris & Giles, 2003). There, as Turner knew,aided self-help was an established option and an important point of reference. ‘Sites-and-services’were a new name for more of the same. The World Bank’s initiative was financially important, butin principle nothing new. Social scientists have given Turner credit for a qualitative shift in policythat did not, in fact, occur.

6. Conclusions

John Turner deserves a different reputation than that which he has acquired. He was a channelfor the diffusion of ideas about squatter settlements that probably originated in Latin Americaand that he helped bring to the attention of housing and urban experts around the world. He,more than anyone else, added the squatter experience to the inventory of research about low-income urban settlements in the developed and the developing world. He added his voice to agrowing chorus of western academics who spoke of the rights and capacities of the urban poor.He expanded rather than originated our notions of self-help housing. More importantly, heexplored their varied ramifications. To the extent that his ideas influenced the World Bank – andthe precise nature and extent of that influence remains unclear – he was an unwitting, becauseunwilling, architect of sites-and-services.

But self-help housing was already an old idea in the 1960s. It became newly popular because ofthe continued, rapid growth of squatter settlements, and because it was consistent with newcurrents of thinking among western academics. This shift in thinking had surprisingly little effecton the type of policy favoured by international agencies. The latter had long advocated aided self-help. If the World Bank had entered the housing field a decade earlier than it did, its fundingpriorities would have been much the same as they became in 1973. This is not an arbitrary conceit.In the early 1960s, the IBRD came under increasing pressure to widen the scope of itsdevelopment financing to include housing. Experience with the Alliance for Progress after 1961,

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and the deliberations of the US Senate in 1962–1963, probably contributed a good deal to this.Apparently at the Bank’s request, in 1964 Weissman’s office prepared an aide m!emoire on housingpolicy in which aided self-help figured prominently while public housing was dismissed.19 In theend nothing came of this, but if it had it is inconceivable that the Bank would have ignored theconsensus of the UN and Senate-sponsored experts by funding public housing. In the early 1970sthe Bank finally came round to the view that housing mattered. In so doing, however, it did notacknowledge or make any revolution in western thinking about the form that housing policyshould take in the developing world.

If there were any revolutionary struggles in the housing field in this period they lay in thedeveloping world, when international agencies tried to implement the self-help schemes that theyhad long advocated. After a little hesitation, some governments endorsed self-help. Peru is a casein point. Other governments, such as that in Thailand, felt threatened and did not. We need toknow much more about which national and local governments resisted such ideas, and why.Upon such historical research we can construct a new chronology of housing policy in the post-war period, one which acknowledges not only continuities in the thinking of western agencies butalso significant and varied discontinuities in the actions of the very diverse nations of thedeveloping world.

Acknowledgements

The research reported here received financial support from the Social Sciences and HumanitiesResearch Council [Canada] and the Trustees of the John Nolen Fund, Cornell University. I wouldlike to thank Joyce Fuller for accommodation, Nalissa Khan for research assistance, AuroraTangkeko for puzzling out the UN Archives, and Ray Bromley, Charles Choguill, and StellaLowder for their comments on an earlier draft. Above all I am grateful to John Turner forresponding to my questions, sending me unpublished materials, and for his generous cooperation.

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