Housing costs and appropriate building materials

Nowadays, low cost housing has become a crying need in almost all developing countries. Increase in population, industr­ialisation and consequent urbanization, migration of more low income people to cities, increase in cost of construction materials etc. are the factors that contri­bute to this very situation. Different efforts are being made by all developing countries to tackle the problem in different ways. The planning, design, research and construction of low cost houses for developing countries are taking place according to the needs and perfor­mance requirements of the occupants. Of course, it changes from place to place and country to country, according to administration, resources of finance, availability of technical talents, construction materials, social condition of people etc. etc. This paper reviews the recent research on suitable low cost modern materials for environmental design of buildings.