Arcadia for some: The strange story of autonomous housing

Hardy and Ward's work reminds us that there was an important tradition of self‐build housing in Great Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. The lotissements of the Paris region represent a similar working class style of autonomous housing in the same era. Just as John Turner and others were celebrating this method of low‐cost housing production as an answer to the problems of shelter in the Third World, planning systems in the First World were systematically crushing it. But the new emphasis on community design may mean a belated return to it.