[9][10][8] Following his return to studies he was influenced by the ideas of Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford through his lecturer Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, which he explored and published with fellow students Paffard Keatinge-Clay and Bruce Martin.
[14][13] In later life Turner described himself as a "moderate anarchist", while he has cited the influence of Geddes on him throughout his career, including the use and adaptation of various Geddesian diagrams.
He was invited to work in Peru by the likeminded Peruvian architect and planner Eduardo Neira, Turner took up the offer in part because he saw little opportunity to put his ideas into practice within the UK.
On the outskirts of cities informal squatter settlements, or barriadas, were forming as people claimed land and began constructing basic homes.
Neira, as the head of the urban planning department of the Ministry of Development and Public Works, had been working on a change in policy for Arequipa to shift the role of the state to facilitating a number of barriadas by granting rights to settlers, providing basic services (water and sewerage), and providing some technical assistance in construction.
[18][19] In 1963 the Chilean-born architect and journal editor Monica Pidgeon invited Turner to edit an issue of Architectural Design on his and others work in Peru.
This work formed the basis of the 1972 book Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process which he co-edited with Robert Fichter.
[8][5] In the preface Fichter describes the book as "part of a breaking wave of reaction against authoritarian solutions to technocratically posed problems".