Housing

Housing may be the Third World's most intractable problem, but mud, adobe, earth-bricks, soil-cement and other traditional building materials are cheap, readily available and can be made and used by the poor people themselves to build their own homes. Today, mud perhaps offers the only practical prospect for building the millions of houses which will be needed over the next twenty years. 

This book challenges many common assumptions about the urban Third World -- for example that urban citizens live in very large cities and that cities are growing rapidly, or that city dwellers benefit from 'urban bias' in government and aid policies. It is about the lives of the 'squatter citizens' and th eproblems they face in their struggle for survival.