John Turner’s book is about housing, but it is also about thebasic things in people’s lives, the forces that control themand 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 beliefthal networks of people can take hold of their own surroundingsand order them intelligently without experts to decidewhat they need. Turner shows that in housing a most basicpart of our daily environment has escaped our grasp. Usingexamples from underdeveloped as well as developed countrieshe describes the kind of housing that has been imposedupon people by their governments and sets it against whatindividual communities can achieve when allowed to helpdetermine the housing they will have. He argues convincinglythat housing policies need not be dictated by centralgovernments but can be put under local control. This isnot to say that housing must be left to free enterprise or thatmodern technology should be abandoned; Turner maintainsthat local communities can be given access to nationalresources for meeting their own needs.