What we learned from John F. C. Turner about the informal city

There is a telling anedocte circulating about John F.C. Turner, the British architect credited as the first theoretician of informal architecture. After visiting in Rio de Janeir some spontaneous favelas as well as social housing projects developed by Brazil’s military junta in the 60s, he repordetly commented: “You have shown me problems that are solutions and solutions that are problems” [1].

A perspectival reversal on urban informality and low-cost housing which still proves relevant today, with at least one billion people living in informal settlement – a figure that according to the UN may well double by 2035 [2]. This means one quarter of urban dwellers on a global scale, though in many metropolis in the so-called “Global South” the percentage is well over 50%.

Turner had developed its critique of modernist planning and top-down housing policies working in informal settlements in Latin America between the ‘50s and ‘60s. For the young architect, just out from London’s Architectural Association, this experience represented a fundamental process of “descholarization and reeducation”, culminating in the renunciation to work for people, to rather begin working with them. Humbly acknowledging that his professional education did not endow him with any deeper understanding or real authority, and that he had much more to learn from squatters than to teach them.

His engagement in the field led him to consider centralized housing production systems as inherently authocratic and inefficient – targeting the housing provision policies in European socialdemocracies as well – and to claim that the state and technical professionals should not replace citizens in the planning and construction of neighbourhoods and dwellings, but rather provide them with the financial and infrastructural instruments to lead the process independently. Perform a function of support and facilitation, leaving to dwellers the lead role in the development of their own environment – individually as well as communities.
 
In Lima’s barriadas, Turner identified a form of city making founded on three “freedoms” [3]: the freedom of community self-selection, which generates a heterogeneous community sharing a homogeneous purpose; the freedom of budgeting one’s own resources, in accordance with personal capacity and timing; and the freedom to shape one’s own environment, in a creative process of self-formation. Mass-scale housing programmes inevitably tend to curtail such possibilities.

A crucial element in his thinking is the shift “from housing as a noun to housing as a verb” [4], that is, from the idea of housing as an object towards the broader concept of housing as practice, and of home as a dispositive for social transformation. In Housing by People, Turner compares two household in Mexico City: a young couple who set up a shelter on a relative’s land and a family with older parents, receivers of a housing unit in one of the government’s residential developments. The provisional shack proves to be much more functional to the couple’s contingent needs, contributing to improve their socioeconomic situation over time, whereas the finished flat brings with it a burden of direct and indirect costs, which end up damaging the family’s standing. With a jump in scale, Turner juxtaposes [5] spontaneous settlement such the Brazilian alagados – self-built ecosystems responsive to their inhabitants’ necessities, in reciprocal remodulation with the community’s cultural and economic transformations – with the heterodirected residential developments such as the government’s conjuntos habitacionales, rigid “antysistems” which hold back the social advancement of their supposed beneficiaries.

In turn, this interpretation of housing shifts the focus from the residential unit as a finished product, towards housing as an incremental, flexible process. Turner observed how the self-builders of Peru’s barriadas employed from two to twent years in constructing their dwelling, and that a neighbourhood takes about fifteen years of progressive development to acquire a complete (though not definitive) character.

Turner ultimately refers to a matter of decision-making power: “When dwellers control the major decisions and are free to make their own contribution to the design, construction, or management of their housing, both this process and the environment produced stimulate individual and social well being” [7], as stated in Freedom to Build.

Over the years Turner will be able to propagate its vision, teaching in various anglosaxon universities – from Boston’s MIT to London’s AA – and working as consultant for institutions such as the World Bank. His approach also incurred into criticism as romanticized and ideological. His adversion for technocratic state intervention and his faith for individual action, rooted in the anarchist-libertarian thought, have been conceptually hijacked. The emphasis on self-help, individual autonomy and legalization of informal settlements were appropriated by neo-liberal discourse and ended up justifying the institutional withdrawal from the housing question and the recourse to market-based solutions [8].

But Turner did not shy away from denouncing the unbalances and injustices underpinning the emergence of informal settlements. His “utopic” position, however, is grounded on a pragmatic analysis of informal communities’ emancipatory potential and the harmful effects of much mass-housing on its residents’ lives – as well as on an assessment of available resources, always insufficient to reach the real scale of the question. At the root of Turner’s approach lies the idea of transforming the condition of informality from within, rather than wiping it out as in the modernist vision: a radical message for its times, which still remains valid half a century later. Nowadays, with the informal city at the centre of architectural debate with varying degrees of superficiality and spectacularization, Turner’s insights urge us to keep in mind that it is not merely a technical or formal question, but rather, an eminently political one.

Preview image: photo Rodolfo Barreto on Unsplash