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Mud, Mud: The Pw OF Earth-based

by: Anil Agarwal

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 MUD. MUD

The potential of
earth-based materials for
Third World housing

by Anil Agarwal

Housing may be the Third World’s most intractable problem.

In most of the cities of Africa, Asia and Latin America
least a quarter of the population has to live in ramshaik?:
makeshift shelters in slums and shanty-towns. In some citiGs
over half the population live like this - and the numbers are’
growing. And in the rural Third World, virtually all houses
are far below the most minimal standards of health and hygiene.
Official housing programmes cannot begin to cope because even
in the cities from one third to two-thirds of ali households
are too poor to pay for the cheapest approved dwelling that
can be built.
“The widespread addiction to cement and tin roofs is a kind of
mental paralysis”, according to President Julius Nyerere of
Tanzania.
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.
Mud is the most widely used building material in the world,
yet it is almost invariably ignored by governments, development
banks and aid agencies.
Mud has made palaces and cathedrals, vaults and arches. In the
Nile Valley , some of them have stood for a thousand years.
Today, mud perhaps offers the only practical prospect for
building the five hundred million houses which will be needed
in the next twenty years.
 CONTENTS
page
CHAPTERONE Introduction 2. 5
CHAPTERTWO
- The Housing Problem 9
The speed of urbanisation,.,housing needs
.,.neglect of rural housing.,.the
response of governments...transfer of
housing know-how...slum clearance,,,
housing standards . ..high-rise or low-rise
,.,a new perspective:self-help and up-
grading . ..can aid help? .,.do they really
reach the poor? ,..problems with slum
upgrading
CHAPTERTHREE Building Materials 28
Cement: material for all seasons?...
the alternatives: traditional building
materials .,.Nyerere and Gandhi.,,the aid
agencies
CHAPTERFOUR The Case for Mud 38
Advantages and disadvantages of mud...
mud walls ..,mud roofs,..the Earthscan
questionnaire
CHAPTERFIVE Country Surveys 46
India...Iran . ..Afghanistan...Pakistan
. ..China...Egypt...Saudi Arabia...Yemen
Arab Republic...Jordan...Iraq...Sudan
. ..Kuwait . ..Algeria...Tanzania...Zambia
. ..Kenya ,.,Mozambique...Ghana...Nigeria
. ..Upper Volta...Latin America...United
States . ..Britain
CHAPTERSIX Conclusions 93
References and Bibliography 96

This publication was written by Anil Agarwal (formerly assis-

tant director of Earthscan and now director of the Centre for
Science and Environment, New Delhi) and edited by Jon Tinker.
It was published with financial assistance from the United
Nations Centre for Human Settlements, but does not necessarily
represent the Centre's views, or those of any of the other
agencies which financially support Earthscan,
ISBN No o-905347-18-8 Published by IIED, London
0 Earthscan 1981 Printed by Russell Press Ltd, Nottingham
Bricks.. . they call ‘em soil :-ement
Nice ones) sb t-hick and heavy
So cheap, so strong
Ooh for building a house.. .
(song from shanty-town George, Lcsaka, Zambia)
Building with mud, Mali. Photo: Sean Sprague
 EARTHSCANPUBLICATIONS

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are as follows:
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A Village in a Million by Sumi Chauhan ISBN No 0-905347-08-O
22PP f2*00/$5*00
Climate and Mankind by John Gribbin ISBN No o-905347-12-9
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ISBN No o-905347 - 11 - 0 104PP ~2.00/$5.00
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Forthcoming titles include:

I James
Water and Sanitation for
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Kimondo and Gloria
All? by Anil Agarwal, including three
Kenya and Colombia by Anil Agarwal,
Moreno
Carbon Dioxide, the Climate and Man by John Gribbin
New and Renewable Energy Sources: two booklets to appear shortly
CHAPTERONE

INTRODUCT
ION
Third World housing may be the world’s most unsolvable problem.
- This briefing document:
* introduces the problemsof Third World housing
* examines the relative inability of accepted policies
to solve them
* reviews mud and other earth-based building materials
in comparison with cement, bricks and other “modern”
materials
* examines the utility of mud-based materials in a score
of countries in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe.
- Over half a billion houses have to be built between now and the
ihouse
year to of the developing countries.
- It was estimated in the early 1970s that the Third World needed
to build over 8 houses per 1000 people per year. In 1970 figures
from 24 countries showed that they were building only 1.8. There
is little reason to believe that the rate has improved substan-
tially since then.
- The housing deficit - the number of new houses needed - has
been growing in most countries.
* In mid-1977, Morocco had a deficit of over 800,000 houses
* The Philippines had a housing backlog in urban areas of
about a million in 1977
* E t’s urban deficit in 1975 was more than 1.5 million
li-ousing units. Cairo alone had a shortage of 750,000 houses
* Nigerian official estimates place the deficit in 14 cities
at about 400,000 houses
- In most cities of the Third World, at least a quarter of the
population (in some cities, over half) lives in ramshackle make-
shift shelters in slums and shanty-towns.
- All Third World cities are divided into two parts. Maputo,
capital of Mozambique, has a cement city with modern tall buildings,
which the Portuguese colonisers buil-t for themselves. There is
a second Maputo, a cane city, where mud and cane houses are built
for the African workers.
- In Ankara, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Lima, Caracas, Guate-
mala City and in many other cities, the proportion of the slum
and shanty dwellers in the total population has been steadily
increasing.
- Third World governments have made many efforts to provide low-
cost houses to the poor. These projects have almost invariably
ended up becoming housing schemes for the middle-class.
6

- Poverty is so intense that between a tilird and two-thirds of

Third World urban households cannot afford the cheapest modern
dwelling on the market, says a World Bank study.
- Sch,emes aimed at clearing slums and re-housing slum-dwellers
in high-rise, high-density,low-cost structures have failed,
because they generally drive the slum-dwellers away from their
jobs. A poor man cannot afford high transport costs. His first
priority is proximity to work,.
- Attitudes are now changing. “\ Several governments already realise
that the slums of the Third World are not slums of despair, as
they are in the deteriorating inner cities of the developed world,
but really slums of hope. \\
- Eventually, everyone finds some kind of shelter. It might be
ramshackle, to begin with, built ‘of tin, cardboard and pieces of
sacking. But if there is securith of tenure - if there is no
threat-of the house being bulldozed away one sudden evening - the
slum-dwellers gradually improve their1 houses.
- The role of governments, it is argued, should be to provide
the environment for this self-help pbocess to flourish, not to
build houses.
- According to one UN document: “The \purpose of a housing policy
is not to build houses, but house the lhopulation”.
- In other words, governments should pro;vide security of tenure,
technical advice, help in acquiring small loans and cheap building
materials. As one Indian building sci
developing countries need is not mass
masses”.
- Slum up-grading schemes based on this approach can now be seen
in several cities in the Third World: in Man$ila, Djakarta,
Calcutta and Lusaka. \
- In site-and-services schemes, the household is given a site
with services like water supply and electricity. Each house is
then constructed by its occupiers at the pace they want.
- Self-help needs a rational policy towards building materials.
- For a building material to meet the housing needs of the poor,
and for it to aid the self-help process, it must have three
characteristics. It must be:
* cheap
* readily available
* easy to use.
- Traditional building materials, such as mud, timber, thatch and
stone, have been used by people for centuries, and meet all these
three criteria.
- For years, seminars of international experts have piously
recommended more research into and more use of traditional building
materials. .But there has been little serious interest from
planners, research stations, governments or aid agencies.
- Everyone, it seems, wants to live in a modern house built with
cement and steel.
- But cement, steel and bricks will not become accessible to all
the people of the world until well into the Zlst century - if
ever. Cement and brick production is energy-intensive, and costs
are likely to increase rapidly as energy prices rise.
- Cement production is a technologically sophisticated process,
and plans to produce more have fallen behind schedule in most
developing countries. Major housing programmes have repeatedly
been sabotaged by rising cement prices.
- The majority of the world’s people still live in houses built
with traditional building materials, and they will continue to
do so for long into the foreseeable future.
- This briefing document looks at the role which mud and other
earth-based materials can play in meeting the housing needs of
the poor.
- Over half the Third World’s population lives in houses that use
mud in one way or another. Mud is at once the most widely-used
and the most neglected building material in the world.
- Builders, planners and governments are not really interested
in mud because it is a low-status material. “The widespread
addiction to cement is a kind of mental paralysis”, wrote Presi-
dent Julius Nyerere of Tanzania in 1977.
- Architects who have tried to promote mud buildings have met
with resistance and ridicule. Egyptian Hasan Fathy, who built a
whole village with mud near Luxor in the 194Os, wrote a book
called ‘Architecture for the Poor’ which has been translated into
several languages. But until he received an Aga Khan award in
1980, Fathy was almost totally neglected - most of all in his
own Arab world. Architects, however, continue to neglect him,
- Mud buildings are well suited to the hot climate of the develo-
ping countries; they are cooler in summer and hotter in winter
than buildings of concrete.
- The state of New Mexico in the south-western USA is probably
the main state in the world to have developed a regulatory code
for mud buildings - mainly adobe (sun-dried mud bricks). At the
moment, in almost every city of the world, a mud building will be
denied a building permit.
- The only technological problem with mud buildings is the threat
of water - from rain or rising damp. But this is not an insur-
mountable problem.
* By adding small quantities of cement, bitumen, lime or
cowdung, mud’s resistance to water can be greatly increased
* an overhanging roof can cut exposure to rain
8

* in the arid regions of the Middle East, buildings with

roofs made entirely of mud have withstood the elements
for over a thousand years
* before the advent of cement, people used to live in
mud houses even in the wet climate of England. The
bottom part of the cob (mud and straw) walls was of
stone and there was a big overhanging roof
* “All cob wants is a good hat and a good pair of boots”,
according to a traditional saying in south England,
where
) 1 . mud buildings erected 50 years ago are still strong
toaay

In dry areas, mud buildings can last a thousand years or more. This fort
(a 'ksar') is in the Ouarzazate region of Morocco.
Photo: Dominique Roger/UNESCO
 9

CHAPTERTWO

THE HOUSINGPROBLEM
Only about 3% of the world’s population lived in towns and cities
at the beginning of the 19th century. A hundred years later,
this had increased to 15%.
- By 1975, the figure was 40%. The last two centuries have been
the era of urbanisation.

The speed of urbanisation

The rich, industrialised North already has more than two-thirds
of its population living in towns and cities.
- In the developing South, the proportion is still less than a
quarter.
- But as the Third World has more people, it already has nearly
as many city-dwellers as the developed world. And because Third
World populations are growing rapidly, the developing countries
will soon have more city and town dwellers than the developed
countries.
- High growth rates in urban population are expected to persist
all over the world.
* Between 1975 and 2000, the urban population is expected
to increase by about a third in Europe, by a half in
Northern America and the Soviet Union, and by two-thirds
in Oceania
* urban dwellers will double in East Asia, increase _two-
and-half times in Latin America, and treble in Africa
and South Asia.
- The urban population both in the developed countries and in the
Third World is not simply increasing. It is gravitating towards
larger cities.
- Between 1950 and 1975, the number of cities with over a million
inhabitants rose from 71 to 181. While the number of these ‘mega-
cities’ nearly doubled (from 48 to 91) in the developed countries,
it nearly quadrupled (from 23 to 90) in the Third World.
- The percentage of the total urban population living in megacities
is one measure of urban concentration. Between 1970 and 1975,
this figure rose from 31% to 34% in the developed regions, and
from 18% to 31% in the developing regions. 58% of East Asia’s
population (excluding China and Japan) was living in megacities
in 1975.
- Overall population forecasts suggest an annual growth rate
between 1975 and 2000 of 1.0% in the developed world and 2.2% in
the developing world.
- But in the megacities, opulations are expected to explode:
by a staggering 5.4% in t e developing world. This means a
doubling every 15 years.
- City by city, the growth figures are dramatic. In the mid-1970s
Mexico City and Sao Paulo were each growing by over half a million
people a year. Jakarta and Seoul were each growing by over a
quarter of a million people a year.
- The number of Third World megacities is also increasing rapidly.
In 1950, only one Third World city, Buenos Aires, had a population
of over 5 million, whereas 5 cities in the non-communist indus-
trialised world had already reached that size.
- By the year 2000, t he Third World will have about 40 cities
of 5 million or mor e compared with an expected 12 in the indus-
trialised countries .
- Some 18 cities in the developing countries will probably have
more than 10 million inhabitants by the year 2000*
- Mexico City may well have over 30 million people by the end of
the century.
- These intense accumulations of people generate enormous demands
for public services and housing: for streets, sanitation, crime
prevention, disease control, electricity, water, telephones,
transport, etc.
- In a village, an open water system can serve people relatively
hygienically, but in a city such a system is an unacceptable
health hazard.
- One of the most expensive components of urbanisation is housing.
And the supply of housing is falling so far behind demand that
there appears to be virtually no solution on the horizon.
- Today, housing may well be the world’s most unsolvable problem.

Figure 1: Anticipated annual population growth rate (population

in millions) 1975-2000 Source: Reference 1

Developed regions Developing regions

1975 2000 rate 197s 2000 rate

Total
population 1132 1361 1.0% 2835 4892 2.2%
Urban
population 783 1107 1.4% 77s 1996 3.8%
Megacities
population 262 447 2.1% 244 916 5.4%
 11.

Housing needs
A global review of human settlements was presented to the UN
Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat) in Vancouver in 1976
(Reference 1). It stated plainly: "Housing conditions have
become significantly worse in most of the developing countries
during the past 10 years. This is in direct contrast with the
trends in the developed countries."
- A more recent study, 'Three Years After Habitat', by the
International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)
(Reference 10) concluded that, if anything, the housing situation
in most Third World countries has become even worse since 1976.
- A UN study in the mid-l '970s estimated that in the decade 1970
to 1980, some 223 million houses would have to be built. The
Third World alone would need 170 million new houses.
- These figures assume each house lasts 100 years - a very optic
mistic figure. And they also assume the Third World will cont::,ue
to squeeze five people into each house.
- To meet the 1980 target, developing countries should have been
building 8.1 houses per 1000 yeople per year. In fact, figures
from 24 developing countries show that in 1970 they built only
1.8 houses per 1000 inhabitants.
- Five countries in Africa had an average rate of 1.3, eight
countries in Latin America had a rate of 1.8 and seven countries
in Asia had a rate of 2.7 new houses per 1000 inhabitants per year.
- Urban planners often talk of a 'housing deficit'. This can be
a tricky concept. Even the poorest people find some kind of
shelter, however precarious. A housing deficit really me= a
aeficit in the number of houses built to a middle-class standard.
- Those who cannot find proper dwellings in the cities either
move into existing slums, or build unauthorised homes and start
new slums.
- Surveys show that 20-28% of the population of major Third World
cities is living in slums and shanty-towns.
- In most cities, this proportion is increasing (see Figure 2).
- The names for these slums and squatter settlements vary:
* callampas (mushroom cities) in Chile
* bustees and jhuggis in India
* favelas in Brazil
* gounberilles in Tunisia
* gecekindu (meaning they were built after dusk, before
dawn) in Turkey.
- Lusaka's squatter settlements shelter about 40% of the population.
Between 1969 and 1972, 22,000 Zouses appeared there. But only
Figure 2: In Third World cities, up to 80% of the population
lives
-. in slums, shanty towns and other uncontrolled
settlements.(Source: References 1 and 43

Population Population in
of city uncontrolled
Year (millions) settlements

LATIN AMERICA
Brazil Rio de Janeiro 1947 2.05 0.40 20%
1957 2.94 0.65 22%
1961 3.33 0.90 27%
1970 4.25 1.28 30% ;
Recife 1970 1.05 0.52 SO% ;
Chile Santiago 1964 2.18 0.55 25% i
Colombia Cali 1964 0.81 0.24 30% j
Bogota 1969 2.46 1.48 60% ;
Buenaventura 1964 0.11 0.09 80% j
Mexico Mexico City 1952 2.37 0.33 14% 1
1966 3.29 1.50 46% !
Peru Lima 1957 1.26 0.11 9%
1961 1.72 0.36 21%
1969 2.80 1.00 36%
1970 2.88 1.15 40%
Ecuador Guayaquil 1969 0.74 0.36 49%
Venezuela Caracas 1961 1.33 0.28 21%
1964 1.59 0156 35%
1970 2.18 0.87 40%

ASIA
S. Korea Seoul 1970 5.54 1.66 30%
Taiwan Taipei 1966 1.30 0.33 25%
India Calcutta 1961 6.70 2.22 33%
Delhi 1970 3.52 1.06 30%
Indonesia Djakarta 1961 2.91 0.73 25%
Iraq Baghdad 1965 1.75 0.50 29% t
Malaysia Kuala Lumpur 1971 0.74 0.27 37%
Singapore Singapore 1966 1.87
Pakistan Karachi 1964 2.28 0.98
0.75 z:
1968 2.70 0.60 22%
1971 3.50 0.80 23%
Turkey Ankara 1965 0.98 0.46 47%
1970 1.25 0.75 60%

AFRICA
Nigeria Ibadan 1970 0.74 0.55 75%
Ethiopia Addis Ababa 1968 0.74 0.66 90%
Senegal Dakar 1969 0.65 0.39 60%
Somalia Mogadishu 1967 0.21 0.16 77%
Tanzania Dar es Salaam 1967 0.27 0.10 36%
Morocco Casablanca 1971 1.45 1.01 70%
Zambia Lusaka 1969 0.28 0.13 48%
Ivory Coast Abidjan 1964 0.44 0.26 60%
Cameroon Douala 1970 0.25 0.20 80%
 13

4000 conventional dwellings were built. Thus, unofficial

housing construction was five times greater than official housing.
- The lack of houses in the Third World causes severe over-
crowding. Several developing countries report that there are
three or more people per room in more than 40% of their housing.
- Most developed countries, and the more developed of the deve-
loping countries, show a reduction in overcrowding. In the least
developed countries overcrowding is increasing.
* In Usmania Mohajir colony, a Karachi (Pakistan) squatter
settlement, 4% of households havemore than 10 people
living in one room; 24% have 6-8; 22% have 4-6; and 29%
have 2-4 people in one room.
* In 1972, in Teheran, 92% of the squatter population
lived in one-room tenements. The average size of a
household was 4.7 persons, and one household in 40 (2.4%)
had to share a single room with a second household. The
average living space per person in Teheran’s squatter
settlements was 3 square metres (32 square feet).
* In the tugurios of Cali, Colombia, 77% of the population
has living space of less than 10 square metres (108 square
feet) per person. In Cartagena’s tugurios, 23% of
households have to share a dwelling with one or more
other families
* In Kanpur, India, a survey recently showed that 58% of
households haanly one room and another 26% had only
two rooms, Three-quarters of the houses had no windows,
and 80% had no latrines. In heavy rain, 66% of house-
holds became waterlogged. Between 1961 and 1976, Kanpur’s
slum population increased by 133%.
- Why is housing getting worse in developing countries? The
reasons include rapid population growth, heavy migration from
villages, inflation, and the low purchasing power of most people.
- People with low incomes are particularly affected by inflation
in housing prices. According to International Labour Organisa-
tion figures , poor urban households seldom spend more than one
fifth of their incomes on housing.
- The World Bank has estimated that 35% of Hong Kong’s households,
47% of Bogota’s, 55% of Mexico City’s, 63% of Madras’s, 64% of
Ahmedabad’s and 68% of Nairobi’s cannot possibly afford-- the
cheapest house on the market (see Figure 3).

The neglect of rural housing

Third World planners have almost totally neglected rural housing.
The problem is clearly so vast that most planners do not even
want to tackle it.
- In 1950, 55% of the world’s population lived in Third World
villages. It seems likely that 46% will still be doing so in 2000.
 14
;,; ,’

d,:,-(_
y:< _:.,_/,

Figure 3: In many developing countries, very few people can

afford to buy a ho!*se The table shows the monthly
income required to purchase the ch=est complete housing unit th-n available
(including a toilet and other services) in six Third World cities in 1970
(prices in 1970 US dollars). The figures assume that loans are available
(usually they are not) and that interest rates are 10%. With interest rates
at 15% (a common figure far 1981) the number of households unable to afford
the cheapest 1970 dwelling would rise to 57% in Hong Kong, 61% in Bogota,
66% in Mexico City, 77% in Nairobi and 79% in Ahmedabad and Madras.
Source: Reference 9

% of
Monthly households
cost of Monthly income unable to
dwelling repayment required afford

Mexico City $3005 $ 28 $ 184 55

Hong Kong 1670 15 103 35
Nairobi 2076 19 127 68
Bogota 1474 14 91 47
Ahmedabad 616 6 38 64
Madras 570 5 36 63

- In most developed countries 40-70% of the housing stock is in

towns and cities. But in the Third World, 50-859, of the housing
stock is in the rural areas.
- Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Brazil and Hong Kong are the few
exceptions. Here, more than 50% of the dwellings are in towns
and cities.
- Though housing conditions in rural areas are sometimes better
than those in urban slums, most village houses are appalling,
even by minimal standards 07 human health and hygiene.
- A survey conducted by the Institute of Development Studies,
Mysore, India (Reference 12) reveals that in many Indian villages
nearly half the existing houses need urgent repairs. Many houses,
built of traditional materials like mud and thatch have stood
for more than 50 years. Very few repairs have bee; carried out.
In some cases, even the straw matting on the roof had been replaced
only once or twice in 50 years.
- “The proportion of houses that meet minimum standards in the
rural housing stock is very low, and they are invariably the
residences of village landlords, and other prosperous local people”,
says a UN report. It continues:
- “The bulk of rural people, comprising peasants, labourers, crafts-
men, etc live in extremely bad conditions. About 750 million of
them, one fifth of humanity, constituting the poorest among the
poor of the world, live under leakv. makeshift. wormv roofq,
 15

huddle on small lots at the mercy of village chiefs and landlords,

and suffer the absence of such elementary services as latrines,
safe water supply, roads, etc.”
- The UN report also notes: “As many as seven out of ten homes
in the rural areas of developing countries are currently so
unsuitable for human habitation as to require replacement or
major alteration. ”
- Better rural housing is urgent and imperative. But there are
so many other necessities (food, ,:lothing, jobs, health care, etc)
that even the rural poor seldom demand housing.
- Governments also tend to neglect rural housing, not only becausn
of lack of money but also because of its dispersed nature. Rural
householders for that reason, too, find it difficult to combine
and put pressure on centralised government systems.
- Only a very few countries have even tried to organise rural
housing schemes. Among them are Cuba, Ghana, ivory Coast, India,
Tanzania, Venezuela and Indonesia.

The response of governments

Many Third World governments have set up housing corpora?ions,
to build or to finance houses, especially for the urban poor.
- Unfortunately, even the cheapest houses built or funderl by these
corporations have been too expensive for the poor. As a result,
these institutions have come to serve the housing needs of middle-
income groups.
- For example, Brazil’s National Housing Bank - BNH (Banco National
de Habitacao) was set up by the government in 1964 to stimulate
low-income housing. It was financed by a compulsory social
insurance scheme, to which all registered workers were expected to
contribute.
- BNH houses built during 1966-71 certainly went to Brazil’s urban
poor. The bank only gave credit to members of a trade union who
did not own another house in the same area, and who had an income
less than six times the minimum wage.
- The workers had been promised that their (compulsory) contri-
butions would be protected against inflation. So the BNH was
committed to making profits. Soon, the bank realised that the
criteria it was using to select borrowers were not helping its
profits. Pressures began to increase from housing entrepreneurs
who preferred to build more expensive houses giving them more
profit.
- As a result, in 1971 BNH transformed itself into a housing
finance bank. It was left to local financial agents to assess
credit-worthiness. The upper income limit and membership of
trades unions were abandoned. Higher housing standards such as
garages and maids’ quarters were introduced. Better locations with
higher land value were sought to ensure purchase of the houses by
highly-paid, low-risk candidates. Now, people applying for
mortgages must have a minimum income.
- The BNH still claims it serves the needs of Brazil’s poor. It
draws its funds from a compulsory workers’ social insurance scheme.
But it is now effectively taking funds from poor workers and
allocating them to the relatively rich.

Transfer of housing know-how

The housing policies of almost all Third World governments have
been designed to build houses. Many experts now consider this
is the wrong objective.
- Most Third World governments, following the policies of the
more developed countries, have tried to industrialise their con-
struction sector and organise mass housing schemes, often based
on labour-saving prefabricated building components.
- It is now widely recognised that this strategy has failed. In
many African and West Asian countries, it has resulted in large
imports of building materials and a domestic construction industry
that is heavily dominated by foreign firms.
- Houses built in this way can only be afforded by the middle
class. The mass of the poor remains ‘unhoused’.
- Another unfortunate result of this capital-intensive housing
strategy is that, in times of economic crisis, housing programmes
are often the first to be axed. Today, with oil imports taking
more and more foreign exchange, Third World planners argue force-
fully that governments must postpone investment ill housing until
the economic situation improves.
- Many housing and urban planning policies have been indiscrim-
inately transferred from the industrialised countries to the
Third World.
- UN agencies such as the Centre for Housing, Building and Planning,
international agencies such as the World Bank, and bilateral aid
agencies such as USAID, have helped transfer inappropriate policies
and concepts, charges Ann Schlyter in a paper published by the
Research Policy Program of the University of Lund, Sweden
(Reference 14).
- Schlyter claims that by spreading inappropriate “solutions” to
the housing problem, these aid agencies have had a negative impact
on Third World housing conditions. They “have not been able to
make any contribution to the improvement of the housing situation
for the working classes”, she says.
- For example, Schlyter pointed out in 1977: “Nearly all research
on housing made in Zambia is done by expatriates”. There are
still very few trained Zambian researchers, and many experts in
the ministries are expatriates paid by aid organisations. There
is no school of architecture or of planning at the University of
Zambia.
 17

- International agencies have funded very few programmes designed

to create indigenous planning and research capabilities in
housing, or to develop housing technologies appropriate to the
needs of the Third World poor, charges Schlyter.
- Schlyter criticises in particular the role in the Third World
of international planning consul tancy firms. She says that the
master plan of Lusaka, Zambia, which was drawn up by the inter-
national firm Doxiadis, had a “direct harmful impact”. The plan
introduced “a town planning pattern without any adaptation to
the local situation and a concept of living completely irrelevant
to the working classes”, she says.
- The preparation of master lans is a well-established approach
to urban planning, an&st decade the UN Development
Programme has funded their preparation.
- But plans have often been drawn up by international experts
who know little about the cultural, environmental and economic
realities of the cities they plan,
- The completed master plans often ather dust on municipal shelves
because local authorities do not hate the resources to carry them
out.

Slum clearance
Urban planners sometimes declare that houses built by the poor
are below some arbitrary technical standards. So the planners
bulldoze the slums, often without providing any real alternative.
- Bulldozing slums is still common practice in the Third World.
Some Indian commentators have argued that instead of trying to
remove property, this type of urban planning aims at removing
the poor themselves.
- In India in 1976, slums were physically destroyed in many cities.
The slum-dwellers were moved to areas far away from the city
centres where they worked.
- Even where adequate alternative housing is provided, slum clear-
ance programmes have rarely managed to rehouse more than a fraction
of a city’s slum population.
- Such schemes are also extremely costly. One of the more success-
ful schemes has been carried out by the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance
Board, which was set up in Madras in 1971. The board issues each
slum family with an identity card bearing their photographs, and
provides new tenements in the original area within a period of
nine months.
- The economic rent of each new 20-square metre (215-square foot)
unit is US$5 per month, of which the -occupant pays only a third.
The rest is paid by the Tamil Nadu state government.
- During the first 7 years of its existence, the board has com-
pleted over 36,000 dwellings. But this effort is clearly inade-
 .

quate to rehouse the 175,000 families living in the slums of

aMadras.

Housing standards
Housing standards have evolved in different ways in the developing
countries and in the West.
- In the West, from the 19th century onwards, housing standards
were intended to protect the weaker members of the community,
notably the workers. They were instituted to prevent landlords
and building speculators from ignoring minimum requirements for
hygiene, safety and privacy.
- In the Third World, housing standards were generally instituted
by the colonial authorities, to protect the European officials
and settlers. The standards usually led to a replication of the
type of dwelling enjoyed in the home colonial countries.
- After independence, national governments often adopted the
former colonial standards, which usually bore no relation to the
needs of the majority of the people, or to what they could afford.
- Third World housing standards have come to protect the needs
of the wealthy, educated minority, not the interests of the poor.
- “Perhaps the most critical area where the operation of standards
has affected the provision of shelter has been in the type of
building material permitted”, says a report prepared for ICSU
nnternational Council of Scientific Unions) by three eminent
urban planners from India, Nigeria and Argentina (Reference 4).
- For example, the Argentine government, in its 3-year develop-
ment plan (1974-77)) decided to build houses “for residents
of shanty-towns, huts, boarding houses or precarious dwellings
as well as for the inhabitants of frontier areas and for low-
income tenants, provided that they have a steady job and are in a
position to put asidp 20% of their monthly income over a period
of 30 years to pay for these dwellings”.
- Argentina’s material specifications included corrugated metal
or asbestos sheets for roofs, paving tiles for floors, aluminium
window frames, etc. “Unrealistic material specifications under-
line why such schemes invariably fail to meet the needs of the
low-income classes”, says the ICSU report.
- The ICSU report criticises existing official housing standards
in the Third World on six grounds:
* They are rarely based on current local experience.
They have either been inherited from the colonial
past or imported from developed countries in recent
years, often at the insistence of international
funding agencies
* They pay little attention to local materials and
encourage imports of cement and steel
 , 19

* They often ignore the limited capacity of people

or nations to pay for housing
* They reinforce social stratification
* Their western orientation has given them a strong
urban bias
* They are extremely rigid and static, and in most
cases cannot be enforced, except in houses for the
rich and in public housing for middle-income groups.
- As well as official standards, says the ICSU report, there is
another type of standard in operation in the Third World: w-
tural standards.
- Cultural standards are derived from traditional building prac-
tices that are found tolerable and acceptable to a large number
of people. They represent the cumulative experience of people
over hundreds of years.
- Cultural standards, argued the ICSU report, are more realistic
in their approach to fundamental human needs than official stan-
dards, emphasise local resources and skills, and often offer the
best environmental solutions to local constraints of resources.
Cultural standards are preserved in the consciousness of the
people, often even as religious values.
- Most important of all, said the ICSU report, cultural standards
are flexible, in sharp conflict with the static, once-for-all
approach of official standards.
- All over the Third World, cultural housing standards are in
conflict with official housing standards, which are often seen a
as irrelevant and inappropriate. But, said the report, “these
standards continue to be enforced vigorously, if not effectively”.

High-rise or low-rise
One housing concept introduced to the Third World from indus-
trialised countries is high-rise development - now increasingly
discredited even in rich nations.
- Indian architect Charles Correa summarises the dilemma:
“Multi-storey tenements cost more to construct yet save on trans-
port and other infrastructure costs.. . Low-rise housing costs less
to construct but occupies more space.” (Reference 16). Which
should be built?
- The choice between low-rise and high-rise buildings involves
markedly different lifestyles. Low-rise housing has many advan-
tages for the Third World:
* An individual can build his own house
* A low-rise building has a shorter construction period,
and involves less capital
* Low-rise housing can be extended as the occupant’s
income increases
 * Low-rise housing has far greater variet
householder builds according to his --+’ c once as each
* Multi-storied buildings have to be built with scarce
and expensive construction materials such as cement
and steel. Low-rise houses can be built without
government involvement out of mud, brick and thatch,
- In monsoon countries, houses built of mud, country tile and
thatch will probably only last lo-15 years, while a reinforced
concrete structure may last up to 70 years. For Correa, this
opportunity for renewability is another advantage. As the nation’s
economy develops, housing patterns can change. Concrete, multi-
storey tenements cannot be upgraded.
- “The five-storey concrete tenement slums built by housing
boards all over this country are really the work of uessimists.
What they are saying is: we aren’t gbing to have any future”,
says Correa.
- The critical issue in most Third World cities is not to increase
densities, but to decrease them, argues Correa. High densities
have not been achieved by high-rise buildings, but by the omission
of play spaces, hospitals, schools and other social infrastructure.
In Bombay, there is only 0.1 hectares (0.25 acres) of open space
per thousand people - and this includes traffic islands.
- Correa suggests reducing the residential density to 80 or 100
people per acre, which may allow cities to dispense with central
sewerage systems and to recycle human and animal wastes locally
to provide cooking gas and fertiliser. “Under Indian conditions”,
he says, “this would have the additional advantage of continuing
the pattern of life which people are accustomed to: as though
Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of a rural India had an almost exact
urban analogue”.
- If this is to succeed in practice, employment must also be
decentralised or efficient public transport must be provided.
Funds for these steps are rarely available.

P new
A ers ective:
The governments of the Third World have failed to satisfy the
housing needs of either urban or rural poor.
- More and more planners are beginning to realise that "10~-CQS~
mass housing units” are never going to wipe out the “housing
deficit”.
- This disenchantment is now helping to focus attention on an
altogether new approach to the housing problem. John Turner,
William Mangin, Elizabeth and Anthony Leeds, and other Western
academics who have been studying or working in shanty-towns, argue
that these settlements should not be viewed as a ‘problem’, but
as a ‘solution’.
- Squatter settlements, they say, are not “rings of misery” or
 21

“creeping cancers”, but evolving communities.

- The residents of old inner city areas of the United States and
Europe have reached the social bottom in what have been called
‘*slums of despair”.
- The new urban migrants of the Third World are, by contrast,
struggling to better their conditions, and often moving socially
upwards. They live in “slums of hope”.
- Third World shanties, argue Turner(Reference 17) and others,
represent not housing in deterioration, but housing in the process
of improvement.
- Dr Anthony Seymour of Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria
(Reference 24) is critical of those who believe that squatter
settlements are a ‘solution ’ to the housing problem of low-income
groups. Seymour dislikes the “optimistic and romantic overtones”
characteristic of the approach of John Turner, William Mangin
and their school.
- Seymour does not accept that squatter settlements are really
“incipient” communities inhabited by people who are moving upwards
socially and economically, and that housing policies should aim
at helping this process. He argues that the poor move into
squatter settlements because of the advantages of doing so - some
of which are lost in legallsed housing. Dr Seymour regards Lusaka’s
squatter settlements as neither a *problem’ nor a ‘solution’.
“The time has come”, he says, “to develop more scientific analyses
of the squatter phenomenon.”
- Although Third World governments may have failed to provide
people with houses ., houses are nonetheless being built, both in
the villages and the urban slums. This type of housing is built
by self-help and with locally available materials.
- Sociologists have begun to paint a new picture of the slum
dweller. Professor Janice Perlman of the University of California,
Berkeley, published ii1 1975 an article entitled ‘The slandered
slum * (Reference 18). She claims there is no truth in the belief
that L-tin American shanty-towns lack internal social cohesion.
- She found that in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro the rate of par-
ticipation in voluntary associations amongst slum dwellers was
“astoundingly high”, with extensive informal friendship and kinship
-I.c..t~~-Gc
,157&““I R.2I Eight out of ten people said their neighbourhood was
more or less united, and that they could count on friends and
neighbours when help was needed.
- Perlman also challenged the typical description of slums as full
of gangsters and hoodlums. Very few favelados felt that crime
was an important ObJection to city life. “In the year and a half
I lived ih Rio, I saw very little-evidence of crime or violence
and felt a good deal safer than I ever had in the streets of New
York City or Boston.”
- The new approach to housing the poor tries to capitalise on the
desire of the homeless to house themselves. Governments, according
 >’ (- .- ‘- --

to this view, should concentrate all their efforts on helping

people to help themselves.
- The poor can be provided with a low-cost core house, consis-
ting perhaps of one room and sanitary facilltles, on a plot of
land. The family can build more rooms when it can afford to doso.
- Even simpler, the government can provide poor families with a
site and with services such as water supply, drainage, roads and
street lighting. It can also provide cheap loans and building
materials. Families can then build a house at their own pace.
- These ‘site-and-services * schemes can also be applied to existing
slums. The government can legalise squatters’ landholdings,
provide the slum with essential services, and help the slum-
dwellers gradually to upgrade their ramshackle dwellings into
permanent structures.
- Site-and-services and slum upgrading are now advocated by the
World Bank and being slowly adopted by a large number of Third
World governments. In the seven years 1972-79, the World Bank
pro-vided US$1114 million to help finance 42 urban projects costing
$2542 mill ion in over 25 countries. Slum upgrading projects are
being supported in Kenya, Tanzania, Upper Volta, India, Morocco,
El Salvador, Bolivia, Egypt, the Philippines and elsewhere.
- By 1982, the World Bank expects to allocate 10% of its resources
to urban projects.
- But a study of 9 multilateral development agencies by IIED
(International Institute for Environment and Development) claims
that “even if all of the World Bank’s financing were allocated to
basic housing amenity, excluding actual construction, these poorest
elements of global society would have at their disposal about
US$232 per person per year to upgrade their shelters” (Reference 20).
- According to the World Bank’s own estimates, it costs $1000-1500
per unit to prepare a site, service it with rudimentary water
supply 9 waste disposal and other essential services, and purchase
materials for small, basic, self-constructed shelter.
- External assistance alone, therefore, will not solve <he problem,
argues the IIED report. “It should therefore be applied in ways
most likely to stimulate government and local action.”
- Many of the site-and-services schemes supported by the World
Bank in the early 1970s have Eroved failures. To cut costs, govern-
ments boughtland relatively far away from the city centres. Rut
this land was also far away from employment.
- It is increasingly being recognised that nothing is more impor-
tant to a slum-dweller than the location of his house. His first
priority is a site from which gainful employment can be obtained.
Many ‘rehoused’ slum-dwellers leave their new sites and return to
their original place of squatting solely to be nearer to work.
- Recognising this, the World Bank now places a greater emphasis
on slum upgrading schemes than on site-and-services schemes,
 ._)I, ,. _
“.

23

though many Bank-supported urban projects are a combination of

both.
- But many Third World governments do not like the idea of up-
grading slums at all. An Lpgraded slum is still a slum. It still
looks like a slum, even-ugh life may have become a bit better
for the people living there.
- Slums are an eyesore to the ruling urban elite, and slum-dwellers
are otten perceived as layabouts and thieves.
- Other critics of slum upgrading see it as an attempt to curb
social unrest without making any effort to restructure the economic
attern of society which is the essential cause of poverty and
omelessness.

Can aid help?

External aid is pitifully inadequate compared to the size of the
problem. Even when World Bank activities are expanded to the
fullest extent envisaged, ‘*two-thirds of the yearly total of new
urban migrants will not be reached. Nor will the existing backlog
of urban demand be met, nor the needs of rural areas”, say Jorge
Hardoy, Susana Schkolnik and Stuart Donelson in an IIED review of
multilateral aid agencies (Reference 22).
- Over their entire period of operations, the 15 main multilateral
agencies (the World Bank, UNDP and the regional agencies such as
the Asian Development Bank and the European Development Fund) had
by 1977 spent only US$1569 million on human settlements - a
classification that includes hucsing, slum upgrading, site-and-
services, urban development and urban transport.
- If one accepts the World Bank’s conservative estimate that there
are 200 million urban people living in inadequate shelter,then the
15 agencies had by 1977 together spent a totally inadequate $8
A single city like Sao Paulo, Mexico, Cairo, Calcutta
!iFP=*agos could use the $1569 million spent by these agencies and
still have room for improvement.
- The funds committed since their beginning to all types of project
by all the 15 multilateral agencies come to $70,592 million. Only
2.2% of their finance, therefore, has gone to human settlements.
- The inadequacy of international funds points to the overriding
need for stepplng up local initiatives and domestic government
attention. It is here that the work of the agencies is woefully
inadequate, charges the IIED report.
* First, there is an urgent need for urban land reform,
SO that every family has the right to a piece of land.
Though an element of land reform is contained in those
projects that the World Bank supports, the aid agencies
do not normally insist or even recommend that urban
or rural land reform should be a matter of national
policy. Until this happens, p rejects supported by the
World Bank and other agencies will have a limited impact.
 l Second, national governments should have policies
to tax the wealth generated by rising land prices,
Most of this currently goes to private land specu-
lators; it should instead be taxed to develop housing
and service facilities which help the poor.
- A continuing problem, says the IIED study, is that inflation
in the cost of land and building materials devalues a house
owner* s repayments on his loan. Funds cannot be effectively
recycled, and housing finance becomes a ‘bottomless pit’,
continually needing new money.
- The aid agencies may be responding to these circumstances by
supporting projects which provide too little for the urban poor.
From direct housing schemes, the agencies have moved to site-and-
services and now to slum upgrading. How far can the level of
assistance be reduced without making it meaningless?
- A recent World Bank project in Tanzania, for example, consists
of ‘surveyed plots’, supplied only with water and plans for on-
site services. Everything is to be furnished by the residents
themselves.
- The cost per plot is only $25, compared with $385 for conven-
tional squatter upgrading. This project is ultimately designed
to help about 26% of the country’s urban poor: more than 315,000
people. The Bank claims that in this project “the cost of services
has been kept at a minimum to bring them within easy reach of the
target group”. It argues that the low level of the loans will
enable all or most of the costs to be recovered, so that the
schemes can be rapidly repeated.

Do they reach the really poor?

William Doebele and Lisa Peattie of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, USA (Reference 23) make another criticism of site-
and-services projects, which they warn may become “vehicles for
the penetration and domination of middle and upper class suppliers”.
- Real self-help, or ‘auto-construction’, seems to be true only
of the very poor. More typically, the owner-occupier and his
family supply much of the unskilled labour, and hire local crafts-
* men for the roofing, plumbing, carpentry and other more technical
j?Zk. Construction materials, tooi are often purchased from very
small-scale dealers.
- If the site-and-services project itself begins to supply these
skills and materials, dozens of marginal entrepreneurs may be
re laced by a few middle-class project officials. For instance,
&- uylng of building materials may seem economically worthwhile.
But it may mean that “the large supplier, who normally has diffi-
culty selling in low-income areas, is now able to penetrate this
market and eliminate his small-scale competitors”, say Doebele
and Peattie.
- Some World Bank site-and-services projects try to work as much
as possible with small suppliers. But deals with large suppliers
I
 25

are easy to justify in terms of administrative efficiency and

difficult to resist politically.
- The World Bank itself admits that it is difficult to help the
bottom lo-20% of the urban poor with site-and-services projects,
which inevitably attract the relatively better-off amongst the
poor. This can leave the very poor even worse off.
- An IIED study of the World Bank, UNDP and regional development
banks states categorically: "So far, the poorest fifth of the
urban population has not been reached [by housing projects) and
no one in any of the banks studied knows any way to reach them"
(Reference 20).
- The only way, it seems, is to abandon anv idea of cost recovery,
and with it the idea of re-using the same funds several times
over. But the upgrading project then indeed becomes a 'bottomless
pit' for continuing subsidies, which are not available on the
scale needed.
- The Indonesian Kampung Improvement Programme, for example, which
the World Bank claims has reached some of the bottom 20% of the
urban poor, is now starting to abandon the strict requirement of
cost recovery.
- Cost recovery means that slum-dwellers have to make regular
cash payments. The sum can be kept very small by reducing the
services provided to a bare minimum. But for many slum-dwellers,
who do not have secure employment and whose incomes fluctuate
widely - casual labourers, street vendors, etc - a regular sum,
however small, can be difficult.
- Some governments take strict measures to recover the loans,
often creating severe problems for the poorest. On the one hand,
rigidly-enforced repayments can exclude many poor families from
a project entirely. On the other hand, nothing can be more disas-
trous for cost-recovery than the belief that the housing agency
is not serious about collecting the dues.

Problems with slum upgrading

Slum landlords remain an important and widespread phenomenon. Up-
grading can have the paradoxical effect (says a report from
Nairobi, Kenya: Reference 25) of harming tenants now living in
the slums. An upgraded environment can attract people with the
capacity to pay a higher rent, and landlords therefore evict the
poorer slum-dwellers. "We will have to take upgrading very
slowly", warns Nairobi's chief city planner. i

- Journalist Victoria Brittain recently described how in spite

of precautions, middle class people are often the ultimate bene_-
ficiaries of schemes for housing Nairobi's poor.
- "The 3000 new houses recently built by the Commonwealth Develop-
ment Corporation could each have been sold nine times over, accor-
ding to the project's manager. And in the streets at the USAID
housing complex, lower down the income scale, you can pick up
pamphlets from house agents offering the new householders twice
what they have just paid for their houses”.
- At Dandora, a current World Bank site-and-services project in
Nairobi, a computer successfully allocated all the plots to
people with low incomes of $45-90 per month. But the very high
standard of building that appeared at Dandora startled the experts.
- An underground land market had been created where some plots
were effectively sold to speculators. The original owner -
officially not allowed to sell for 5 years by Nairobi’s city coun-
cil - remained the ‘legal’ owner, and presumably moved back to a
slum.
- An underground capital market also sprang up in Dandora, to
finance construction work. What happened was that a flood of
money came in from the rural areas, from relatives of the person
allocated a plot. The family would support, and eventually share
the gains of, the lucky relative. The two-roomed house, envisaged
by the planners often became a six-roomed lodging house.
- Housing experts have listed other basic problems with slum
upgrading schemes. They include:
* Terrain: existing slums are often situated on poor land,
in ravines, on the side of a hill, or in swampy or
easily-flooded areas. Such land is often difficult to
upgrade; drainage costs, for instance, can be prohibitive.
* Density: some slums are extremely densely populated
-the Tondo in Manila with 900-1200 people per hectare
(360-490 per acre) for instance, and Klong Toey in Bangkok ’
with 250 people per hectare (100 per acre). Upgrading
there will always mean that some dwellers have to be
moved to fresh sites. If attractive land is available ’
nearby for the ‘overspill’, the slum-dwellers can be
persuaded to move easily. Otherwise, there can be
difficulties.
* Tenure:slum-dwellers need secure tenure of the land on
mthey live if they are’to put their labour and
meagre.savings towards upgrading their dwellings. This
can be a complex process. Many governments have no
adequate records. The dweller may own his house but not
the land. Landlords may exist, and’ if they are not
compensated adequately, they may create political and
legal obstacles to the project. Upgrading and site-and-
services projects tend to work more easily in countries
like Zambia and Tanzania where land is largely owned by
the government.
* Participation and leadership: community participation is
essential to a slum upgrading project, for making decisions
about relocation, tenure, self-help programmes, tax
collection, compensation, etc. But many governments mis-
trust any leadership from the poor, branding it subver-
sive or communist. Some slum communities have clea’rly-
identified leaders, but many slums cut across class, race,
language and religions. Landlords and tenants in the same
slum can also make local decision-making difficult.
 27

- The Third World’s housing problems may not be unsolvable, but

they certainly have not been solved so far.
* Rural housing is almost totally neglected
* Megacities are growing like cancers, t;ith most of their
people in slums and squatter settlements
* Government house-building programmes are a failure because
most urban poor cannot afford even the cheapest house
* Housing programmes for the poor end up supplying houses
for the middle-income groups
* Slums are still being bulldozed out of sight
* Western-based housing standards are inappropriate in the
Third World
* Outside aid is totally inadequate
* Self-he1 squatter upgrading and site-and-services schemes
d’best prospects
* But even these schemes rarely reach the very poor.
- In these circumstances, what have mud and other traditional
building materials to offer?

In Third World shanty-towns, people must build their homes with what they
Call. Here, in Teheran, the materials are tin cans and mud.
Photo: Sean Sprague
CHAPTER THREE

BUILDING MATERIALS
Building materials are one of the most neglected aspects of the
human settlements debate.
- Few Third World governments have tried to develop a local buil-
ding materials industry. Instead, they launch massive construction
programmes without any thought for where the building materials
are to come from.
- This has led to the wholesale adoption of often inappropriate
Western materials and techniques - even including the large-scale
import,,of prefabricated or modular housing units.
- The oil-rich Arab countries in particular have tended to use
imported industrialised building systems to mass produce houses.
The director of a Saudi development corporation, Ibrahim al-Monif,
has strongly criticised this trend. Speaking in Dhahran in 1978,
al-Monif said these units were not suited to the Middle Eastern
climate or culture and could not be maintained locally. Such
imports, he argued, held back any local housing industry based on
indigenous labour.
- One reason for this neglect of traditional architecture, building
materials and techniques is that few countries have any locally-
trained architects.
- The Aga Khan recently announced his support for a joint research
programme into contemporary problems and history of Islamic archi-
tecture. Ironically, this programme is to be conducted by two
US institutions: Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard
University.
- The Aga Khan warned (Reference 27) that in the last 20 years
many parts of the Islamic world had seen increasingly rapid and
ill-considered destruction of its architectural heritage, combined
often with indifference to, or ignorance of, Islamic curtural
traditions.
- In most of the Third World, there has been increasing reliance
on the Western wonder substance: cement. Cement has become a status
material, representing all that isrn tind desirable in housing.
- Algerian architect Kamel Noui-Mehedi spent some months in the
rural areas as part of the government’s plan to build a thousand
new socialist villages. He reported in African Environment
(Reference 28) that the peasants knew precisely what they wanted:
“A permanent nouse, in concrete, with concrete floors”.
- “Compared to the stone and ‘diss’ (straw) buildings with which
they have had unfortunate experiences all their lives, -dEsd.;l.~;~
of concrete gives them the feeling of security”, wrote
- The Algerian peasant focuses on concrete because that is what
the rich and comfortable use for their houses. But Noui-Mehedi
describes the experience of a peasant who was given a badly-built
 i!Y

concrete house by the municipal authorities. “Only a few months

sufficed for the humidity to cause the whole family to r’iee from
their home. Today, that family is living in a house with a
thatched roof and is keeping its cattle in the concrete house.”

Cement: material for all seasons?

The type of cement most widely used in the world today should
strictly be called Portland cement. It was developed in the 1820s
in England.
- Typically, Portland cement consists of a mixture of limestone
and clay, which is ground to a powder and heated to about 15OOOC.
Gypsum is added and the mixture ground once again.
- Cement is normally mixed:
* with sand to form mortar
* with aggregates (small stones or gravel) to form concrete
* with asbestos to form roofing sheets.
- Today, Portland cement is the world’s most important building
mater&Z. Global output of cement reached 700 million tons in
1974-75: an average consumption of about 175 kilograms (385 pounds)
per head.
- Most of this cement is used in the industrialised countries. In
Denmark in 1973, the per capita consumption of cement was 520 kg
(,l140 lb) while in India in 1974 the figure was only 24 kg (53 lb).
*
- The bulk of cement is made in Europe, North America and the USSR
which, in 1966-67, between them manufactured 72% of the world’s
cement.
- In 1973, the Third World paid $405 million for cement imports.
Only two years later, the figure was $1030 million. Because most
developed countries make their own cement, imports by developing
countries accounted for 80% of the world’s cement trade in 1975.
- The Third World’s leading importers of cement are, of course,
the oil-rich OPEC countries, which have been witnessirrg a massive
construction boom. Leading importers in 1975 were Libya, Nigeria,
Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Iran, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore,
Kuwait, Syria, Tunisia, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Malaysia.
- The leading exporters of cement are Japan (which in 1976 accoun-
ted for over 15% of the world’s cement exports) and Spain, Greece
and South Korea (each of which accounted for about 10% of the
world’s cement exports). Other exporters are France, West Germany,
Italy, Thailand, Philippines, Pakistan, Turkey, Colombia, Kenya,
Cyprus, Bahamas, Mexico, Norway, Iraq, Malaysia, Lebanon, Egypt,
Belgium, Romania and North Korea.
- “The most striking feature of world cement trade during the past
10 years”, says a study by India’s Cement Research Institute, “has
been the efforts made by the more industrialised developing coun-
tries which have invested in new cement plant to supply the rest
of the Third World”.
- To reduce the cost in foreign exchange, several developing
countries are trying to increase their own cement production.
In all the developing regions of the world, cement production
virtually doubled between 1966 and 1975, while that of the
developed countries increased at most by about half.
- Some particularly remarkable increases in production were in
Sri Lanka (up 390%), the Philippines (up 175%) and China (up 172%).
- Despite these rapid increases, there is a cement shortage. In
many Third World countries, building activity goes in cycles
depending on the availability of foreign exchange for cement

A builder adds a cement coating to protect the mud brick walls of a new
house in a Bamba village in Senegal. In Europe, even a poor man can buy
ten bags of cement with a day's wages. A rural African has to work ten
days t3 buy one bag. Photo: Sean Sprague
 31

imports. *'Throughout the developing world precious resources are

wasted in half-completed projects which cannot be finished because
there is no cement", says the Intermediate Technology Development
Group.
- There are four main reasons why cement is unable to satisfy
the Third World's housing needs:
* cement production is capital intensive
* cement is an energy-intensive product to make and use
* the necessary raw materials are not always available
* cement production is at present almost always a large-
scale technology.
- Cement production requires capital investment. Indian planners
estimated that an investment capital of $650 million would be
required to meet the projected increase in cement consumption
from 24 kg (53 lb) per capita in 1974 to 50 kg (110 lb) by 1978-79.
And to make the cement plants run efficiently, further investment
is required in coal mining, power generation and rail transport.
- India has failed to reach, in each of its 5 national development
plans, the projected cement production capacity. Supply of cement
has as a result always fallen behind demand, causing hoarding,
blackmarketing, and soaring prices. The government tries to control
prices, but cement is seldom available in the market at the
government-fixed figure. This picture is common throughout the
Third World.
- Cement production is also a highly energy-intensive process.
Fuel costs make up between one third and one half of basic cement
production costs.
- In Denmark, the cement industry accounts for about 2% of the
national energy bill. And in Jamaica, oil and other im orted
energy makes up 60% of the cost of a bag of locally-pro *cement.
uce
- Rising energy costs also affect cement prices via transport.
In India, for instance, the main raw materials for cement are found
in the south and east-central parts of the country; coal reserves
are in the east; and most cement consumption is in the north and
west. So, enormous amounts of coal and cement must be transported
across the country.
- The energy consumption involved in the transport of cement
always shows up in the selling price. According to studies by the
Intermediate Technology Development Group in London (Referenc'e 31):
* the price of cement in up-country Tanzania is often
2-3 times more than at the cement factory in Dar es Salaam
* in Indonesia, the price of cement is rarely below $100
per ton, and in parts of Sumatra it is often as high
as $500 per ton.
.- Cement is particularly expensive in rural areas of the Third
World. In Botswana, Sudan and Honduras transport costs exceed

c
the depot price of cement after 100-200 miles (160-320 km) over
poor roads.
- The third problem in cement production for the Third World is
limited availability of raw materials. Portland cement requires
‘Ilmestone (or oyster shells, or marl, or chalk) ; clay or shale,
sand, blast furnace slag or fly ash from coal-fired power stations;
and gypsum.
- “Ideal raw materials are becoming steadily more scarce’*, warns
the Cement Research Institute of India (Reference 32). This has
“forced cement producers to consider limestones of inferior
qua1 ity”.
- Dr G.M. Idorn, a Danish cement expert, is particularly worried
about the future supply of raw materials for the manufacture and
use of cement. He estimates that by the year 2000, some 1800
million tonnes of cement will be produced- annually. To turn that
into concrete, 700 million tonnes of water and 17,000 million
tonnes of aggregates (pebbles or gravel) will be required.
- Idorn argues (Reference 29) that the limestone, clay and gypsum
for 1.8 billion tonnes of cement annually can probably be found.
But he doubts that 0.7 billion tonnes of fresh, clean water can
be reserved for making concrete, or that 17 billion tonnes of
aggregates can be quarried and used, “however inexhaustible the
visible deposits of sand, gravel, and rocks may seem today”.
- “Europe and the United States are already feeling shortages of
traditional quality concrete aggregates*‘, says Idorn. “Further-
more, in several developed countries, fresh water is now becominp
a priority material c . ..competing demands on water for irrigation
and civil consumption will soon appear.”
- The answer, according to Idorn, is intensive research and develop-
ment, which is today missing in the cement industry. In 1974,
R&D expenditure by the US cement industry was less than 0.5% of
cement sales. Idorn believes that materials, energy and capital
consumption could be reduced to a half or even to a third by 2000,
given adequate research.
- The fourth problem that inhibits the rapid expansion of cement
production in developing countries is the inappropriate scale of
the technology.
- The worldwide trend is to put up very large cement plants. But
many erperts feel that such large plants are not suitable for
developing countries.
- Most of the cement plants set up in India in the 1950s and
1960s had a capacity of 300-500 tonnes per day (tpd). More recent
plants are of 600 tpd capacity, and India’s National Committee
on Science and Technology has been investigating plants of 2000
tpd capacity.
- Such very large cement plants require massive reserves of raw
materials ; they need a considerable transport infrastructure;
and their machinery has to be imported.
 33

- Large plants require a level of,financial commitment that few

developing countries can make. In practice, only governments or
foreign investors can set up cement plants. The delay that usually
takes place in arranging such large sums of money required is,
according to ITDG, “one of the main reasons why expansion in pro-
duction so frequently lags behind demand, causing the almost
universally experienced cement scarcity”,
- But the general trend is still towards large plants. China,
by contrast, has widely used small-scale cement plants with a
capacity of around 100 tpd. According to Jon Sigurdson, director
of the Research Policy Institute in Sweden, more than half of
China’s annual output of cement was recently being produced in
about 3000 small-scale plants, one for almost every commune.
Unfortunately, few technical details are known outside China.
- At least three different institutes in India have been involved
in R&D on small-scale cement plants since the mid-1960s. But they
still play no significant role in India’s cement production.
- George Fernandes, Minister of Industries in the recent Janata
government in India, said that “the mini-cement plant...has always
been sabotaged by bin business interests”. Under Fernandes, the
government gave special incentives to entrepreneurs interested in
setting up small 100 tpd plants, which can be built near minor
limestone deposits that would otherwise be unused. About 100 such
sites were identified in India, and more than 40 entrepreneurs
responded to government incentives to build such plants. Within
5 years, India could build enough mini-cement plants to add some
two million tonnes (about 10%) to current annual capacity.
- Third World cement production is unlikely ever to rise to a
level that can meet the housing needs of the 4-5 billion people
who will be living in Asia, Africa and Latin America by the year
2000.
- In other words, a cement famine is likely to remain a regular
feature of developing countries. This scarcity, together with
rising energy prices s is bound to push cement prices up.
- As a result, it is almost impossible for the Third World poor
to acquire a modern cement or cement-based house.
- In the late 197Os, while a worker in northern Europe could bu)
10 bags of cement with a day’s wages? an urban Latin American
could only buy one bag. And a rural African needed to work for
ten days for a bag of cement.

The alternatives: traditional building materials

Developing countries cannot do without cement. Its USC is e3sen-
tial for dams, canals, roads and other important development pro-
jects - which usually have first call on cement supplies when
there is a shortage.
- So it is imperative that Third World planners start to minimise
the use of cement in housing. This is especially so if they want
to meet the housing needs of all their people - including the poor.
- This re?lisation is slowly starting to spread. Countries which
still use concrete blocks to build houses are now beginning to
look towards the establishment of a brick industry - especially
small-scale, labour-intensive, non-mechanised brick units, which
can be established in villages.
- Brick manufacture, too, poses problems. Firing (baking) bricks
is an energy-intensive process, which can raise the cost of fired
bricks beyond the reach of the poor.
- Lime, an altem&tive to cement used widely in ancient times, is
now receiving increasing attention. The Romans used lime-pozzolana
-n
mixes to make mortar for their magnificent bridges and aqueducts,
many of which still stand.
- Pozzolanas are materials that are not themselves a cement, but
react to lime and water to form a material that sets and hardens
like cement. Various pozzolanas exist in nature, and occur in
most countries. The Romans used the volcanic ash from Mount
Vesuvius as a pozzolana. Lime manufacture - which involves roas-
ting limestone - can become a good village-level industry.
- These developments should help provide cheaper and more
accessible alternatives to cement. But efforts are also needed
to develop traditional building materials such as mud, thatch,
bamboo, reeds or stone.
- "Traditional building materials are an area which has received
little attention even from the so-called appropriate technology
movement*', says Jorge Hardoy, the Argentinian urban planner.
- Since the UN Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver in
1976, the housing literature is full of expert reports recommen-
ding the use of traditional materials. e.
- The regional paper for West Asia presented to the UN Conference
on Science and Technology for Development at Vienna in August 1979
(Reference 38) said: "Though there exists :* rich heritage in design
and construction (based largely on mud) from Hadhramut to Nubia,
there is very little concern for these technologies that may be
within the reach of the bottom 70% of the population of the region.
These beautiful structures often decorate travel literature .but
apparently little engineering attention has been devoted to
studying and developing traditional forms."

Nyerere and Gandhi

In his 1977 assessment of the Tanzanian economy, President
Nyerere of Tanzania said (Reference 39): "The widespread addic-
tion to cement and tin roofs is a kind of mental paralysis".
"People refuse to build a house of burnt bricks and tiles; they insist
on waiting for a tin roof and 'European soil' - cement. If we want to
progress more rapidly in the future we must overcome at least some of
these mental blocks.
 "Not very long ago, it was estimted that to build an improved tradi-
tional house - &at is one with a permanent roof, insect-proofed wood-
work and a thin cement floor - cost about 7000 shillings. A smaller
cement block house costs at least 18,000 shillings to construct. Yet,
although we know that nwst of our people cannot afford the mortgage or
rental costs of the cenxmt house , we persist in promoting its construc-
tion. Obviously, it is more comfortable, and lasts longer. It is a
case of the best being the enemy of the good.
“For most people the only effective choice is between an improved and
an unimproved traditional house - they cannot afford the cement house.
So, if we do not help them to build an improved house of traditional
materials, or of burnt bricks and tiles if they have a little more
mOney, then we shall not be doing anything to help them live in a decent
house", concluded Nyerere.
- The Indian Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi, also argues in
favour of houses built with traditional building materials (Refe-
rence 40) I “All the new houses”, she pointed out in a 1980 inter-
view with Earthscan, “are built for energy consumption. They are
hot in summer and cold in winter, whereas our old houses are not.”
"The ancient house in which I was born and lived contained no cement,
so probably it was cheaper to build. It never leaked in my memory.
But when this house came under the purview of the Jawaharlal Nehru
Memrial Fund, they said Oh! the ceiling might fall on the children,
because it was(converted by them into) a children's home. So then they
got engineers and they found it was only made out of bran and lime and
various things like that, and it was at least 100 years old then. But
it has never fallen yet.
"So we have not only to have new technology, but look a bit to the old
technology. There is much sense in what people have evolved over the
years to suit their climate, their environment, their way of living.
You can't keep all of it because our way of life has changed, but I think
a lot of it can be adapted and made more efficient."

The aid agencies

What role have the aid agencies played in the choice of building
materials in developing countries. 7 A report prepared by IIED (Refe- . .’
rence 22) points out that though many developing countries are
dependent on imported building materials, aid agencies give few
loans towards these. Loans for building materials from the multi-
lateral agencies since they started totalled only $417 million, a
mere 0.6% of their total spending, up to 1977.
- “Virtually all of the identifiable loans for building materials
have been for cement plants”, says the IIED study. Only UNDPhas
devoted any money at all for other types of building material:
funds for roofing tiles and brickworks.
- The World Bank, for example, is a strong supporter of site-and-
services proJects and of self-built houses, But the IIED report
states that despite the World Bank’s repeated emphasis on “basic
needs” it found “no evidence at all of loans for research into
alternative building materials or technologies”.
 - Similarly, the European Development Fund has not provided any
loans which could have directly benefittx the building materials
industry. But a study carried out by the agency itself shows that
its shelter and infrastructure programme spends excessive amounts
on concrete foundations, cement walls and steel frames.
- The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has given loans worth
$77 million for the development of building materials industries,
mainly for cement plants (in Peru, Costa Rica, Argentina, Uruguay,
Brazil) Bolivia and Ecuador). IDB also supported a plant for manu-
facturing cement blocks and another for prefabricated building
materials (both in Argentina).
- The Central American Bank for Economic Integration, the Latin
American Savings and Loan Bank, the African Development Fund and
the OPEC Special Fund had by 1977 not made any loans at all for
the development of a building materials industry.
- The Andean Development Corporation has provided a loan to Ecuador
for a cement plant, for studies on the building materials industry
in Bolivia and on two cement plants in Ecuador.
- The Asian Development Bank has provided relatively large loans
to Nepal and Indonesia for cement plants; it has also provided
a loan to Taiwan for a mill to produce aluminium products, which
cculd produce items for the construction industry.
- The African Development Bank and the Arab Bank for Economic
Development of Africa have each providealy one loan, to the
CIMAO regional cement plant in West Africa.
- The Islamic Development Bank has given loans for cement plants
in Malaysia, Guinea, Morocco and Yemen.
- - The Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development has given a
” cement works loan to Egypt.
- The IIED study recommends that international agencies should do
far more to support the construction industr;r_ and to develop t both
traditional and unorthodox materials.
- Likely areas of research (for which the IIED study says there
“a desperate need”) are stabilisation of mud, improvement of
izmboo and other wood varieties , and research into new ways of
making cement.
- “Given the fact that such-a large percentage of low-income
housing in urban areas is made of cardboard, it might also be
useful, even if potentially difficult, to provide money for
paperbrnrd manufacture, including lacquer for cardboard water-
proofing”, says the IIED study.
Adobe, a mixtuz-e of mud and straw baked in the sun, is the traditional
building material in much of Latin America.
made in Sucre, Bolivia. Here adobe blocks are being
Photo: Sean Sprague
CHAPTERFOUR

THE CASE FOR MUD

If the 600 milli.on houses required by the end of the century were
to be built in a single row, they would go around the circum-
ference of the Earth nearly a hundred times.
- It is unlikely that even half these houses will be built with
modern building materials such as bricks, cement and plastics.
Traditional building materials such as bamboo, wood, soils, grasses,
lime, various types of local pozzolanas, stone, cloth and animal
skins will, therefore, continue to be used.
- Already, the majority of urban households in the Third World
cannot afford to purchase even the cheapest modern house.In the
rural Third W Id this proportion is probably well over three-
quarters of hi:seiolds. If the world economy continues to worsen
in the 198Os, and cement and brick prices fuelled by rising energy
prices continue to rise, the small proportion of households who
can afford modern housing will become even smaller.
- It is, therefore, important for housing planners to stop paying
li service to traditional building materials and to start using
zlik---
- Of the various types of traditional building materials available,
mud is the most widely used and will remain so long into the
foreseeable future.
- Over half the Third World’s population now lives in mud buildings
of one form or another. Different societies have used mud in
different ways, and have given the technique many names.

Figure 4: Some different names for various uses of earth in

building
Word Used in
Adobe Mexico, southwest USA, Spain
BauQe France
Cajon Spain
Chika Ethiopia
Cob England and Gambia
Jalous Sddan
Kacha India
Nogging England
Pise Israel, USA, Zimbabwe, France
Sod (soddys) Nebraska and Kansas, USA
Swish Ghana
Tapia Africa, Australia, Zimbabwe
Teroni Mexico
Torchis France
Tubali Nigeria, West Africa
Wattle and daub England
 39

Advantages and disadvantages of mud

Mud, as a building material, has the following advantages:
* It is cheap, and in most parts of the world, it is
readily available - one reason why it is so widely used
* It provides excellent heat insulation,so inside a mud
building is cooler in summer and hotter in winter than
a building made with steel and concrete
* It is strong in compression (-.e difficult to squash)
and so makes good walls.
- But mud also has some serious disadvantages:
* It is eroded easily by water, which makes its use
difficult in areas with high rainfall or possibilities
of flooding
* It has a low tensile strength (ie is easy to pull apart),
which means mud roofs are difficult to make
* It is susceptible to mechanical damage. Rodents can
easily make holes in mud walls and undertheoor, or
thieves can dig their way into the house
* Mud does not grip wood properly, so gaps often develop
around wooden doors and windows in mud walls. Consequently,
mud houses often have few openings and are badly venti-
lated. Where walls are made of reinforced mud, wattle
plastered with mud, or sun-dried mud bricks, this problem
is not so severe
* Mud soaks up water and becomes very heavy. Consequently,
wooden beams supporting a mud roof begin to sag, the mud
cracks and the roof starts leaking. To reduce sagging
of beams, many villagers in the states of Uttar Pradesh
and Punjab in India build very narrow rooms, across which
even a bed cannot be kept. But even these rooms tend to
leak in heavy rain:.
- Most of these disadvantages can be overcome by suitable improve-
ments in design and technology:
* Stabilisation: other materials (eg bitumen or cement)
can be added to mud to improve its strength and resistance
to water. This technique is known as soil stabilisation.
* Architecture can be used to enhance the advantages and
reduce the disadvantages of mud. Narrow streets and closely
packed houses can produce a cool environment in a hot
region, and overhanging roofs can reduce erosion caused
by rain.
* Structural techniques, too, have been used to enhance the
characterlstlcs of mud. For instance, in several parts
of the world, walls of earth are traditionally made by
ramming successive layers of earth between shuttering,
which makes a wall that can take the weight of the roof.
Mud walls
* Sun-dried bricks : walls made when wet mud is moulded into
 bricks, which are left to dry in the sun, can be found
in many parts of the world. Sun-dried mud bricks are
known as adobe in Mexico and the USA.
* Wattle and daub: in this techn.ique, mud is daubed (plas-
tered) over a structure or mat made of sticks (known as
wattle).
* Walls are also often made with simple lumps of ill-formed
clay placed one on top of another, and the wall is then
plastered with a coat of mud mixed with some organic
material such as cowdung.
* In the rammed earth technique, mud is rammed manually
between two shutterings (vertical frameworks) on either
side of the wall. After one layer has been rammed, the
shuttering is raised, a second layer of mud rammed onto
the first layer, and so on.
* Building blocks can be made by compressing earth into a
solid block’ln a machine called the Cinva Ram.
- More recently, walls have been made with stabilised soil. Mud
stabilisation can be done with cement, bitumen or lime:
* soil stabilised by adding cement to it - the mixture
is often called soil-cement
* bitumen (asphalt) improves the resistance of soil to
water but does not alter its strength
* bitumen soil blocks can be easily made in a simple wooden
mould and then dried in the sun
* lime is in many parts of the world more easily available
and cheaper than either cement or bitumen.
- Lime-stabilised soil is not as strong or water-resistant as
cement-stabilised soil but it is certainly an improvement over
plain soil. Soil stabilised with cement or lime can be further
compacted in a Cinva Ram.
+;
- Various materials ranging from plant juices to cowdung have
been mixed with mud, or used for rendering (painting on the outside
of the wall) to make mud walls more waterproof.
* In Northern Ghana, an extract of boiled banana (or
plantain) stems is mixed with lateritic sdil
* In Upper Volta and Northern Ghana, a plant extract locally
known as ‘am’ is used as varnish. It colours the walls red.
* In Northern Nigeria, ‘laso’ (an extract from the vine
Vitis pallida, locally known as ‘dafara’) and ‘makuba’ (made
from the fruit pod of the locust bean tree) are used for
waterproofing mud walls.
* Sap from mphorbia lactea mixed with lime has been used, as
has sap from the wuntia cactus. Agave leaves also provide
liquid for finish.
* Cowdun mixed with clay has been used in Ghana and very
+- ely in India.
wi
* In the Sudan, ‘jaloos’ (mud) houses are treated with ‘zibla’,
a local waterproof material made from cow or horse dung.
 41

The same material has been used in Botswana.

* Straw has been mixed with mud since Biblical times,
especially in West Asia. In Ethiopia, straw (preferably
'chid*: the straw of millet) is used in mixing 'chika'
or soil paste.
Q,
Mud roofs
Mud roofs are made in several parts of the world by plastering
mud over a mat of thatch or bamboo sticks supported by wooden
beams. The problem is that these roofs become damp and heavy.
- Making strong roofs entirely with mud has proved to be an
extremely difficult task. The only technique by which a roof can
be made entirely with sun-dried mud bricks was invented over 6000
years ago in the Middle East: the vault. Some ancient vaulted
roofs in the arid Middle East are now over a thousand years old
and are still intact.
- Dr A.A, Hammondof the Building and Road Research Institute of
Kumasi, Ghana, has made a study of the common defects found in
mud buildings (Reference 41). The main causes of deterioration
are shrinkage, cracks, erosion, underscouring and mechanical
damage, due directly or indirectly to water.
By using a suitable mix of appropriate architectural elements
;eg stone foundations) structural techniques (eg overhanging
roofs), stabilisation ieasures (eg the correct proportion of clay
or cement in the mud) and care in siting (eg with good drainage),
mud buildings can be successfully built in almost all types of
climatic regimes, and with proper care and maintenance, they
should last for decades.

The Earthscan questionnaire

In 1979, Earthscan sent a questionnaire to about 110 institutions
and individuals thought likely to have an interest in the use of
mud as a building material:
* international and bilateral aid institutions (eg the
World Bank and USAID) which have funded low-cost
housing schemes in developing countries
* various building research institutes and architectural
departmentsof universities
* groups and institutions listed by UNEP's Infoterra system
as having an interest in traditional building materials
* several well-known appropriate technology organisations.
- Only 20 out of 110 organisations and individuals replied. All
but one stated that mud and other traditional building materials
can make an important contribution to the pressing housing problems
in developing countries, g iving the following reasons:
* easy and wide availability
c * low cost
I-
‘_
42

Egyptian architect Hasan Fathy was given a special Aga Khan architectural
award in 1960 for his :fftS~iXij WGik tG I;iOiX&&5 tLciu'iiic?L?ai AraPlC C&Sign
and building techniques in mud. Mud-brick arches, vaults and domes have
been used in the Nile Valley for six thousand years. Below, a general view
of mud roofs in Iran. Photos: Hasan Fathy
 43

* suitability for labour-intensive construction techniques

l construction techniques using traditional building
materials are simple, so no sonhisticated eauipment
or expertise is required
* people are already familiar with these techniques and
materials
* they can be handled by local people and are thus amenable
to self-help housing construction
* materials like mud are climatically suited to the needs
of developing countries
* they require less energy in manufacture than modern
building materials such as cement
* well used they are aesthetically nleasinq, and assert
cultural identity
* they can release scarce modern building materials for
important development projects
l their use reduces the demand for foreign exchange.
- Professor Witold Rybczynski, of the Minimum Cost Housing Group
at McGill University, Montreal, commented that the main potential
of mud and other traditional building materials is in the rural
areas. Most earth techniques are extremeiy labour-intensive; if
labour costs have to be paid, mud is more expensive than cement
blocks.
- But despite the acknowledged importance of traditional building
materials, most institutions have never conducted or funded
research on local traditional building materials.
* The National Environment Secretariat, Kenya, said it was
planning to work on wood, mud bricks, and clay tiles.
l The Cottage Industries Division, Bangkok, Thailand, is
planning to work on mud bricks and bamboo.
l The World Bank replied that it neither carries out nor
sponsors building materials research, but’ claimed to be
keeping itself “abreast of technical trends which influence
development”.
l Nicolas Jequier, principal administrator of the Development
Centre, OECD, Paris, said that traditional building
materials was Ifa vital area of research. Very little
is done in this field”.
- Very few aid agencies replied at all. This tends to confirm
the charge that the aid agencies have neither tried to use tra-
ditional building materials nor to fund research on them, despite
their professed support for low-cost housing programmes.
- This neglect is surprising when considered against the dozens
of expert group meetings, symposia and conferences, including the
1976 UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat) in Vancouver,
which have recommended greater research on and use of traditional
building materials.
- But Mr P.A. Campbell of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Tech-
nology, Aus”cr-&iia commented: “I cannot see any purpose in doinq
research into mud’bricks . ..There is enough information to design
with these, so why do research?”
- Some of the institutions said that they had done research on
traditional building materials. But their results had only
l’s1 ight” , “limited” or “no” effect on the housing policy of their
country.
- The Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUBCO) in New
Delhi, a housing finance corporation, said it collects information
about research on low-cost techniques, and tries to incorporate
the results into the low-cost housing projects it finances. HUDCO
has advocated the use of mud as masonry mortar, and of stabilised
mud for walls and floors.
- HUDCOhas financed about half a million dwelling units, out of
which 86% have been reserved for families with monthly incomes
not exceeding 600 rupees (Rs) ($75). It says that low-cost
techniqvzs dellsloped in India have helped it to reduce the use
of materials by over Rs11.5 million ($1.4m). This figure, though,
is relatively small against the Rs1300 million ($163m) of loans
which HUDCOsanctioned in 1979-80.
- Most of the replies to the Earthscan enquiry claimed that
housing planners and researchers are not giving adequate attention
to traditional building materiais. Why not? Various reasons
were advanced:
* “Most of the serious research on building materials
has been done in developed countries by experts who had
a marginal interest in the less developed countries”
(Professor Fred Moavenzadeh, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, USA)
* “House planners and researchers in most developing
countries are often expatriates, knowledgeable in
their own technologies. Often they do not stay long
enough anywhere to get acquainted with local idioms
and very often they have to fight a ,ainst local counter-
parts who see progress only in terms +he o ‘latest’.”
(Erica Mann, Kenya Architectural Association, Nairobi)
* “Discouraged by existing by-laws and regulations which
prohibit use of mud as a building material....overwhelming
influence of modern materials impo!:ed by the public
relations media and promotional campaign....lack of
proper knowledge about traditional building materials;
and prejudice of both common people and decision-makers...
local building materials being regarded as inferior,
temporary, unhealthy and ugly. I1 (Naigzy Gebremedhin,
United Nations Environment Progra,mme, Nairobi, Kenya)
* Wood salesmanship (of modern building materials);
lack of indigenous education; aspirations; urban
magnetism” (H.S. Murison, Department of Architecture,
University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia)
* “Most traditional materials require high maintenance and
 45

so do not fit into monied economies very well. Tradi-

tional houses... are difficult to keep clean - by any
definition you like - so local authorities don’t like
them. They have a low status. The only people who
like mud bricks are middle-class dropouts in developed
countries...” (Dr. P.A. Campbell of the Royal Melbourne
‘Institute of Technologies, Australia).
- In sum, the replies suggest that a number of factors are res-
ponsible for thx neglect of traditional building materials:
* misplaced fascination with modern materials .
* the distorting influence of western and western-trained
architects and engineers
* the adoption of inappropriate building standards from
colonial periods.
- A curious vicious circle is operating. Housing planners di;;iss
traditional building materials because they are inferior.
researchers do not spend time on improving them, because housing
planners are not interested.

Mud must be protected from water, otherwise it cracks and crumbles. This
company-owned house on a tea estate in Bangladesh uses jute sticks with a
:nud coating, but stands on a more solid plinth to protect it against
rising damp. Photo: Tom Learmuth
 CHAPTERFIVE

COUNTRYSURVEYS

':, Third World architecture has evolved over thousands of years.

It reflects the accumulated expertise of the people - on how
to build cheaply with available resources, in ways appropriate
to the social, cultural, economic and environmental conditions.
- Theeold city centres of Isfahan, Cairo and Delhi can still
teach modern architects a number of lessons: a sense of scale
and proportion; the juxtaposition of open and closed spaces;
shaded streets, oriented according to the sun's angle or to catch
prevailing winds; the ability to achieve high densities with
low-rise buildings.
- Unfortunately, m+odernThird World -.architects ignore indigenous
architecttire when they do not treat it with outright contempt.
The Thirdmrld has imported Western architectural concepts
wholesale. They are usually inappropriate.
- Traditional styles are usually confined to mimicry in the design
of the facade. Only very rarely is a serious assessment made
of the functional elements of indigenous architecture: the use
of courtyards, for example.
- The country surveys that follow are not complete. Latin America
and francophone Africa are badly under-represented, because the
original research was done in English. But the purpose of this
chapter is not to give a comprehensive survey, but to demonstrate
the potential of earth-based architecture in a variety of cul-
tures and climates.

India
Mud is one of the most widely used building materials in India:
probably more than half of all Indian houses are made from mud.
Even in the urban areas. mud is often used by slum-dwellers to
build their shelter. -
- India's population, now over 600 million, may be about 900-1000
million by the year 2000. About 80% of the existing population
lives in rural villages.
- "It is not easy to visualise how these people can be housed",
admits Dr Surya Kant Misra, assistant director of India's Central
Building Research Institute (CBRI).
- The CBRI estimates that just to meet the 1977 housing shortage,
12.1 million new houses would have to be built in the rural areas,
and 4.7 million in the urban areas. "Assuming an average modest
cost of 3000 rupees (Rs) ($375) for a rural house and Rs1200 ($150)
for an urban house, the financial requirement works out Rs92,700
million ($1,160)..; an extraordinary sum for any government to
provide", says the CBRI (Reference 43).

.
 47

- A study for the UN Econt:;inic and Social Commission for Asia and
the Pacific (ESCAP) estimates that India will need a minimum
investment of $1.3 billion in housing in urban areas alone every
yearbetween 1975 an-93 to meet the existing backlog and
future demand.
- Like some other developing countries, India has launched several
low-cost housing schemes, but they have all turned out in practice
to be middle-class housing programmes.
- Devendra Kumar, director of the Centre of Science for Villages,
complains: “Architects talk of building low-cost houses, but
the majority of the people can only afford no-cost houses”. The
CBRI states that 60-‘/O% of the urban population cannot afford to
buy even a basic house with about 20 square metres (215 square
feet) of floor area.
- There is a great scarcity of building materials, particularly
cement and steel. Little effort has been made to find materials
suitable for low-cost housing.
- In India, labour is cheap, so building materials ‘can form -as
much as 60-65% of construction costs.
- Mud houses provide shelter to the majority of India’s popula-
tion today, and will continue to do so in the immediate future.
Unfortunately, government housing programmes think only in terms
of brick and cement.
- Except for some extremely scanty reports prepared by the Census
of India, very little information is available on mud housing.
Mud is looked upon with contempt by planners, architects and
civil engineers.
- “Mud is considered permanent”, says
Dr. B.S. Bhooshan of ent Studies, Mysore
(Reference 46). “The result is that official programmes do not
take .mud seriously. But experiences and some reports show that
mud houses can stay even up to 50 years if properly constructed”.
- Bhooshan argues that bricks and cement cannot satisfy India’s
housing needs. “First of all there is no money for this and,
secondly, there is a scarcity of such materials. Therefore, the
main criteria for housing in rural areas should be economy in
construction, and the use of local material. A third criterion
is that housing programmes should be non-paternalistic in nature . ‘.’
In other words, they should promote self-help.
- “Mud construction techniques satisfy all these criteria”, argues
Bhooshan. “Mud is cheap and available everywhere, and mud houses
are highly labour-intensive. Normally the material cost of a
mud house will be less than 25% of the total cost.. .the cost of
many mud and thatch hutments in rural India seldom exceeds Rs150
($19) l

- “As very little skill is required, villagers can join together

and lend hands in constructing houses...House building in the
rural areas thus never achieves the character of an industry, and
does not require large corporations to manage it”, asserts Bhooshan.
- Mahatma Gandhi once remarked: “What India needs is not mass
production, but production by the masses”. Dr. S.K. Misra,
assistant director of CBRI, adapts this saying to point out:
“India does not require mass housing but housing by the masses”.

*** Techniques
Unlike in arid West Asia, houses built completely of mud are
uncommon in India. Mud is used mainly for constructing walls
and floors, and as a plastering material. It is used as a
roofing material only in areas with low rainfall, normally below
25 inches (640 millimetres) a year. The most common rural house
in India is a house with mud walls and a thatched roof.
- According to the National Buildings Organisation in New Delhi,
431% of India’s rural population lives in kutcha houses (tem-
porary houses with mud walls and thatch roofs), 371% in semi-
pucca (semi-permanent) houses, and 19% live in pucca houses.
- The techniques of mud wall construction vary enormously. Walls
made of mud lumps are the most common. To make such walls, mud
is kneaded by foot to make a paste. Ash (as in Karnataka), straw
(as in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh) or cowdung is sometimes added
to improve the consistency. The mud paste is then placed in
horizontal layers to form a wall.
- In southern parts of West Bengal, where fine clay is available,
the paste is cut up into chunks with a spade, which are then laid
one on top of another almost like crude unfired bricks.
- Normally, such walls are about 18 inches (48 centimetres) thick
and are constructed in layers varying from 1 to 3 feet (30 to
90 centimetres) high. Each of these is laid only after the
lower iayer has dried. In some places, as in Rayalasema in Andhra
Pradesh, twigs and palm leaves cover the mud wall to protect it
from rain.
- Many locally-available materials are used by Indian villagers
to reinforce mud walls. In areas where reeds or bamboos are used
as reinforcements, the load of the roof is usually borne by wooden
poles instead of by the walls. The normal practice in Karnataka
and Andhra Pradesh is to press moist mud on either side of a
frame of woven split bamboo, which is nailed or tied to vertical
poles.
.
- In parts of north Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa, Punjab,
Andhra Pradesh and the Brahmaputra valley, a layer of mud (mixed
with ash or straw) is plastered over a wall of bamboo or reed
wattle.
- In some areas of Maharastra, walls of intricate basketwork are
daubed with a mixture of mud, stone and clay.
- On the banks of the Godavari river in Andhra Pradesh, date palm
or palmyra leaves are used to make a wall and then mud is plas-
tered over them.
- Rammedearth walls are found in hilly Himachal Pradesh. Moist
 49

earth is mixed with small stones and clay. Two wooden planks
form a shuttering, and the moist mud and stone mixture is rammed
between them. This is left to dry for a day or so, the wooden
planks are removed and placed above the dried portion, and the
process is repeated until walls of a desired height are obtained.
Doors, windows and other openings are fixed as construction pro-
gresses. Sometimes split bamboo sticks are inserted in the walls
during construction to protect against possible burglaries. Such
wails are usually 18 inches (45 centimetres) thick.
- Sun-dried mud bricks, usually hand-made, are now becoming common
in rural India. They are normally larger than kiln-fired bricks,
but do not conform to any standard size. Sun-dried bricks usually
make stronger walls than mud.
- Mud roofs are not as common as mud walls. But they are still
widely found in a belt from Kashmir in the north to the Deccan
plateau in the south, covering SouthernKashmir, Punjab, Himachal
Pradesh, some areas in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, Rajas-
than and central parts of Maharastra. In the south, mud roofs
are found only in some parts of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
- Indian mud roofs are normally flat, with the mud used to cover
a supporting platform of wooden planks, reeds, bamboo matting
or stone slabs. Mud is beaten down and occasionally plastered
with an emulsion of cowdung. Layers of leaves may sometlmesl6e
added to prevent the mud from dropping through.
- A unique double-skinned sloping roof is reported from Orissa.
In this case, the mud roof acts as a ceiling to protect the house
from fire. A second, outer roof is constructed of grass and
leaves over the sloping mud roof, to protect it from being washed
away by rain.
- In the Kurnul area of Andhra Pradesh, flat roofs are formed by
spreading sheets of stones over wooden beams and covering them
with saline clay.
- In northern districts of Karnataka, a layer of mud 1 inch (2;
centimetres] thick called ‘melmudde V is rammed over a matting of
bamboo or reeds placed on wooden joists. Such a roof requires
repairs once in three years.
- In the wet climatic conditions of Kinnaur district in Himachal
Pradesh, a flat mud roof known as lkhayap’ is common. Layers of
large leaves and local bushes are spread over thick wooden planks.
On this frame, a 6-8 inch (15-20 centimetre) thick layer of mud
is carefully spread, and beaten by small wooden clubs. The masons
and others press the mud by walking about on the roof; children
are sometimes asked to play on the roofs under construction. Once
the mud layer has been smoothed and pressed, water is sprinkled
on it. These roofs tend to leak in heavy rains, and snow has to
be shovelled off quickly,= to avoid leakage or collapse.
- In some parts of Karnataka, mud is skilfully used to make the
roof even without the lower support of bamboo matting or reeds.
Wooden joists are placed at intervals of about 9-12 inches (23-
30 centimetres) and small lumps of mud are placed horizontally
India has a vast variety of traditional designs for village houses,
reflecting the different materials locally available. Below: flat mud
roofs Jver stone walls in North Kamataka. Above : square mud huts with
tall grass roofs in Andhra Pradesh.
Photos: Anthropological Survey if India
 51

on them. Inch by inch, the mud cantilever grows till it covers

the space between the two beams. Holes are often made in such
mud raofs for light. During rains, these holes are covered with
earthen pots. In the Dharwar area in Karnataka, beautiful pottery
chimneys are used to allow the smoke to escape.
- In houses with mud, stone, wood or brick roofs, the roof does
not form a major visual element. By contrast, in houses with
mud walls and sloping thatched roofs, the roof is the dominating
feature.
- Mud architecture in India is visually rich. It forms an impor-
tant component of the country’s peasant culture. Even the interiors
of mud walls are often decorated. Beautiful examples can be
found in northern Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab.
- Rooms in mud houses are often dark and badly ventilated, but
they provide comfortable living in the extremes of the tropical
climate - warm in winter, and cool in summer. Mud houses thus
represent the best used of local resources and adjustment to
local climate, for the level of affluence found in most parts of
rural India.

*** Sarvatogriha
The government-sponsored Central Building Research Institute
(CBRI) has conducted extensive research on housing for the poor
(Reference 48). Based on the traditional West Asian building
technique that has in recent years been promoted by Professor
Hasan Fathy of Egypt, the CBRI has built a new type of house
called a ‘sarvatogriha’ (house for all), one at Roorkee and another
at Hyderabad.
- The end walls of a sarvatogriha are built first, to the full
height of the room, and then the side walls up to a height of
1.20 netres (4 feet). Two identical parabolas are then drawn
on the end walls and guiding threads stretched between the:-
- Roofing bricks are laid in mud mortar in alignment with the
parabola. Care is taken to see that continuous joints do not
occur between successive courses. This forms a strong vaulted roof.
- Once the main shell is complete, a layer of mud and straw 5
centimetres (2 inches) thick is applied over the shell for heat
insulation, followed by a layer of brick tiles 3: centimetres
(11 inches) thick for rain protection. The external surfaces
are painted with lime and surkhi (powdered bricks), and mud mixed
with wheat straw is used for internal plaster.
- The CBRI has used burnt bricks instead of the sun-dried bricks
used by Professor Fathy in Egypt; this gives the structure greater
strength, which is necessary for a rainy climate.
- The burnt bricks do not necessarily have to be produced in a
mechanised brick-making plant. Bricks are often produced in
Indian villages; they are hand-moulded and then fired using easily
available fuels like cowdung, grass, leaves, firewood or coal.
The materials used in a sarvatogrihaarethus, despite the use
of burnt bricks, within the reach of some villagers. There is
no use of cement or steel.
- “Sarvatogriha holds promise of a technology which suits the
cultural temperament of India’s villages”, says Dr. S.K. Misra,
assistant director of CBRI. “The speed of construction is slow
and human. The building can be left unfinished at any stage to
be taken up later for completion, and all members of a household
can work on it.”
- The cost of a sarvatogriha is lower than that of a conventional
house even when it is built using hired labour. The roof was
estimated in mid-1976 to be 46% cheaper than a conventional re-
inforced brick roof. A sarvatogriha house with 2 rooms of total
area 21.6 square metres (232 square feet) costs Rs5210 ($650).
- The CBRI found that a sarvatogriha is significantly more com-
fortable in the summer than a cement and brick house with a flat
roof; temperatures inside the sarvatogriha are on average 2OC
lower than inside a conventional house.
- Another type of low-cost house developed by CBRI in which mud
can be used directly is based on the skeleton system of construc-
tion. A skeletal structure consisting of a pre-cast roof suppor-
ted by pre-cast beams and columns is built first. The walls can
then be filled in by the owner with whatever material he can
afford: mud, sun-dried bricks, substandard burnt bricks, bamboo
matting, or more modern materials. Since the load is taken by
the beams and columns the strength of the wall is not important.
Yet the structure is durable.
- The prefabricated elements need not necessarily be produced in
a modern factory, but can be made on a relatively decentralised
basis in small towns, and then transported to the construction
sites.
- Using this technique, the CBRI built 2500 village primary
schools in Uttar Pradesh in a record time of three years: two to
threeschools a day. All the components required to build a
school could be loaded on to a single truck.
- But like all new types of low-cost houses, sarvatogriha and
skeleton housing hkve still to penetrate the villages and become
5accessible to the poor. In India, the average yearly per capita
income 1s RslOOO ($125). If 15% of this were invested in housing,
i: would still take more than 30 years for the average citizen
to meet the cost of a sarvatogriha house.

*** Research and development

Protecting mud walls against rain has been the subject of CBRI
research for many years. The institute has developed a water-
proofing technique by spraying a mixture of bitumen and kerosene
using an insecticide sprayer.
- Bitumen is heated in a drum until it melts. The molten bitumen
 53

.
is then slowly added to another drum containing kerosene and
vigorously stirred. The mixture is sprayed on while it is still
fluid. The cost of this technique is about Rs1.30 (16 US cents)
per square metre, and the wall’s life is increased by 3-4 years.
- TO protect the walls of the average house using this bitumen-
kerosene technique, the Centre of Science for Villages at Wardha
(Reference 48) estimates the cost at Rs30-45 ($4-6). The average
village house owner spends RsSO-150 ($6-19) per year on mainte-
nance, so this technique should be economically viable.
- The CBRI claims that bitumen-stabilised mud plasters can be
used to protect certain types of roof as well. But there are
possible drawbacks. Damp rising from the ground can do as much
damage as rain, and it is feared that the normal evaporation of
this rising damp will be hampered by a waterproof layer of bitumen
paints outside the wall.
- Another problem, says the CSV, is that the lower part of a,mud
wall can be eroded by flowing surface water in the rainy season.
The solution proposed by the CBRI is that villagers should build
a brick and cement mortar wall up to plinth level, and then build
the rest of the wall with mud.
- The CBRI has recently brought out an even cheaper method of
protecting mud walls. A mixture of soil, paddy straw cuttings
and used motor oil is mixed thoroughly and applied thinly to the
wall by hand, and allowed to dry. Then a paste of cowdung, clayey
soil, old oil and water is pl.astered over the first layer.
- The CBRI claims that this technique has been effective on a
large number of rural houses, and only has to be repeated every
five tc six years.
- Since 1958, the National Buildings Organisation- (NBO) in New
Delhi has established 8 rural housing centres. Based on social
and economic surveys in over 100 villages, the NBO has_devefoped
over 200 house designs to suit different regions, and supplied
them to state governments. Among the techniques promoted are
soil stabilisation, waterproof mud plaster and fire-retarding
chemical treatment for thatch roofs (Reference 49).
- Under another scheme, the NBO joins with a state government to
build a village cluster of low-cost houses for landless agricul-
tural workers. Local building materials are used, and the landless
workers contribute their labour. The clusters , over a dozen of
which have already been erected, help to demonstrate improved
techniques to the surrounding villages.
- The government of India, under its minimum needs programme, has
a scheme to supply house sites to landless agricultural labourers.
The scheme aims to help 17 million rural households; so far, 7
million landless families have been allotted free house sites.
- The NBO has developed two types of one-room house for these
landless workers. One has sun-dried brick walls with waterproof
mud plaster and a thatch roof treated with fire-retarding chemicals.
The other has burnt brick walls and a tiled roof.
- The first type of house was estimated in 1974 to cost less than
Rs1500 ($190) when built with self-help, and %he second about
Rs2000 ($250). The plinth area of each house was 20 square metres
(201 square feet). These designs have been used to build 4000
houses in Punjab recently, says the NBO.

*** Low status of mud

Despite all these efforts, success has been very limited, both
for the NBO and the CBRI. Very few of these low-cost techniques
have been adopted by villagers. The NBO admits that "despite
the use of preservative treatment and stabilising agents, soil
has not become a popular building material".
- The Appropriate Technology Development Association at Lucknow
is not convinced that villagers will ever adopt such techniques.
"The villagers look to the house not in terms of 3-5 years but in
terms of 50-100 years. These techniques only made houses slightly
more stable, but did not improve them much otherwise."
- Status is at the root of the problem of non-acceptance. Mud
houses are associated with poverty.
- If anybody can afford a better house, he is almost certain to
think of a good permanent structure built of cement, bricks and
steel. He is hardly interested in spending money on improving
his mud house.
- For those who can afford it, construction of a pucca (permanerja
house is started soon after harvest, on the income generated bv
a good crop. If money is insufficient, the building is comp::.eted
over a period of years. Bricks will be purchased in one year,
part of the house will be constructed the next year, and so on,
until the full house is completed.
- The Ggst of this is prohibitive for the majority of villagers.
So while the rich villagers live in pucca houses the poor villagers
continue to live in mud houses, dreaming all the time that they
may own a permanent house themselves one day.
- Many villagers who cannot afford a well-built pucca house try
to economise by degrading construction specifications. A mortar
will be used containing too little cement. The breadth of the
foundation and the thiEkness of the wall will be reduced.
- The Planning Research and Action Institute (PRAI) at Lucknow
found this was a widespread practice in village houses. The walls
and roofs of many such cheap pucca houses had cracked, and the
floors and plaster had started to wear away. Because the walls
were too thin, the house was uncomfortably hot in summer. Houses
started to look shabby in only 3-5 years. But as only such econo-
mising could put pucca houses within the reach of villagers,these
houses were still being built.
- PRAI tried to develop cheap construction techniques that did
not have these disadvantages. Villagers usually make a g-inch
(23-centimetre) wall entirely of baked bricks. In one experi-
 55

mental wall, half the baked bricks were replaced with sun-dried
mud bricks. The bricks were placed in an interlocking arrange-
ment and the wall thickness kept at 131 inches (34 centimetres).
This improved the stability of the house and kept it cooler, but
the cost of the 13;-inch (34-centimetre) wall turned out to be
the same. The wall was kept standing for two rainy seasons
without any roof but no deterioration could be noticed.
- In another experiment, the sun-dried bricks were replaced with
simple mud mortar, which was filled in between the baked bricks.
This wall was also found to be stable, and was 20% cheaper than
the mixed brick and baked brick walls.
- In southern India, Mr Popposwamy of the Aurobino Ashram at
Pondicherry has been trying to promote the rammed earth technique
of building houses. This traditional technique, which originated
in Morocco, is used in India only in a few northern hill regions
like Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh.
- Popposwamy believes that the best way to provide low-cost housing
is to suggest improvements to the materials and techniques that
villagers already use. He advocates load-bearing rammed earth
walls to eliminate the use of wooden posts placed in the ground,
which are very susceptible to attack by termites. Rammedearth
walls are four times stronger than traditional walls of the same
thickness, he says (Reference 51).
- He also suggests that windows, including lintels, which are
usually made from expensive wooden frames (susceptible to termites)
be made instead with fired bricks. This approach helps to get
over the problems caused by mud’s inability to grip wood. In
many village houses, there are gaps around wooden window and
door frames.
- At Mahaveerpuram, a new village in Tamil Nadu, more than 25
houses have been built using the Popposwamy rammed earth tech-
nique m Each house costs about RslOOO ($125) including labour.
- To reach the vast millions who live in India’s villages, these
techniques will have to be demonstrated and taught. Will the
various Indian housing agencies take up this task?
- In 1972, the Kerala government launched a pioneering scheme to
provide adequate dwellings for 96,000 landless agricultural
families. Each family was to get a semi-permanent three-room
house (kitchen, bedroom and living room) with an area of 250
square feet (23 square metres).
- Construction materials were random rubble in mud mortar for
the basement and foundation, cement topping on a consolidated
gravel base for the floor, sun-dried mud brick interspaced between
columns of burnt brick for walls, and tile set on forest timber
for the roof.

*** Practical problems

A study of this scheme by the Centre for Development Studies (CDS)
at Trivandrum gives a good insight into how difficult it is to
organise rural housing programmes.
- The construction cost of the house-type chosen by the Kerala
state government was estimated in 1971 to be Rs1250 ($156),
inclusive of the cost of unskilled labour. The village councils
were asked to raise voluntary public donations, and each allottee
was asked to pay a total of RsllO ($14) in 11 equal monthly in-
stalments - less than 10% of the total cost of the house - to
ensure a sense of participation. Unskilled labour was to be
supplied free on a voluntary basis. The Kerala government agr-eed
to supply free tiles, timber and cement.
- But the scheme soon ran into problems, partly due to the choice
of scarce building materials. Construction costs began to rise.
By the end of 1974, the cost of each house had doubled to Rs2400
($300) l

- What the experience with this scheme has shown, says the CDS
report, is that a large-scale programme should try to build
“houses which make smaller demand on the relatively scarce mate-
rials in the economy, such as cement and timber”.
- Kerala has no Portland cement works, .I?though there are a
number in neighbouring Tamil Nadu. But ,nstead of cement, mortars
made of lime and local pozzolanas might have been used. But was
that an easy option? The CDS report discussed the point: “Lime
is produced in very small labour-intensive units all over Kerala,
and considerable social benefit would derive from a greater sub-
stitution of lime for cement. But there are two serious obstacles
to such a change. The first is that the quality of the lime
produced in these small units is very variable...the second...
is that supply is inelastic. Increased demand tends to result
in price increases rather than in increased supply.”
- The scarcity of construction timber turned out to be even worse
than that of cement or steel, and the Kerala Forest Department
concludes that timber will become even more scarce in the future.
If instead of tiles-on-timber the roof had been made of thatch
supported by the more readily available coconut wood, it would
have reduced the house price by about 10%.
- The question of building materials is complex. “A straightfor-
ward reversion from the ‘modern’ (reinforced concrete) to the
‘traditional’ (tile-on-timber) cannot...be contemplated”, says
the CDS report. “A ration& longer-term approach would be the
development of new sources of constructional timber by the treat-
ment of country timbers, today used only for firewood, and the
development of ‘intermediate’ roofing types which replace some
cement and steel by tiles or other clay products.”
- The report recognises that the technology chosen by the Kerala
government was very cheap compared with other means of providing
a permanent structure. But how many people can afford to pay
even 100 rupees per square metre? Are there not still cheaper
technologies to provide satisfactory housing?
- There is, of course, palm and grass thatch, but this only
 57

produces impermanent structures. Moreover, thatch has a high

rate of decay. "Thatch of coconut palm is generally made of
double thickness, half of which must be replaced every year",
says the CDS report. "Chemical treatment of thatch to prevent
decay is possible, but the cost of treatments proposed so far
is prohibitive.*'
- An expert committee was set up by the government of Kerala to
look at ways of lowering the cost of houses, utilising local
materials
_._. ~--~ and labour to the maximum extent possible. The committee's
1974 report commented: "Many rich clients want their houses to
be ostentatious, for this gives them 'status'. Such ostenta-
tious houses have increased the prices of housing beyond the
reach of everyone else."
- The committee's recommendation was simple (Reference 53).
"These prevailing tendencies towards waste of resources, along
with considerations of equity, force us to state categorically
that the time has come for a strong campaign towards simple and
comparatively less expensive building for all. We decry any move
towards Low-Cost Housing for 'the Poor'. Reform. rethinking,
replanning and redesigning must start at the top-and spread-through
all strata of society."
- The Kerala committee criticised the government's own "very
unrealistic pattern of accommodation based entirely upon status
and social position . ..A comparatively elderly man at the peak
of his profession, with his children grown up and already living
and working elsewhere, is provided with a large area of unwanted
floor space, while his ‘younger assistant, usually with not only
a number of growing children but often with aged parents or
other dependents as well, has to live as best he can in one or
two small rooms with inadequate cooking and sanitary facilities".
- To the committee, cost reduction was an "easy" job. "It is our
belief,** the committee stated, "that by proper selection of known
techniques and material and by a careful examination of each
item of construction for its functional need, we can substantially
reduce the cost of construction below current costs".
- The committee suggested the use of burnt bricks and tiles,
laterite, lime and country wood (ie non-forest timber) - materials
which are strong, functional, locally .lvailable, cheap and
aesthetically attractive.
- But like the recommendations of previous bodies, the report of
this committee has had little effect, either in Kerala or in
other parts of India. It has simply become an important footnote
in academic papers on low-cost housing,
- The Hindinewspaper Nai Duniya recently warned (Reference 54)
that housing, like clothing, had become a matter of fashion. "It
is only in the matter of food that we still retain our Indianness
. . . Row can cement be strengthened by steel is a subject on whic’Ei-
our civil engineers read whole treatises. But how can mud walls
be strengthened by bamboo is a subject that only those villagers
know who suffer from floods every year."
- "If the eskimos of the arctic tundra can make houses of ice
which suit them and keep them warm, why can't we make houses
which suit our environment?", asked &i Duniya.
- It is interesting to note that only one leader in the Third
World, who had the option not to live in a mud house, actually
chose tlo live in one. That was Mahatma Gandhi, who led India
to independence. The wattle and daub structure in Sewagram
Ashram, where he lived during the 193Os, is today a nztional
monument for Indians.

Iran
Even in oil-rich Iran, modern construction techniques are failing
to keep up with the housing demand. Official policy under the
Shah (this section does not deal with events since the Islamic
Revolution of 1979) was to provide one housing unit for every
family. This means 7.8 million houses by 1992 - an increase of
6.7 million units.
- The Shah's government believed that building industrialisation
and mass production of building materials was the only way for
Iran to achieve its housing objectives. Investment in prefabri-
cation grew rapidly, especially by foreign companies.
- In an articie entitied "Bottlenecks in the adoption of appro-
priate technologies - the case of Iran", Ron Alward and Robert
McCutcheon claimed that the fascination with steel and concrete
buildings in Iran had reached a position where the peasant "regards
his home with distaste despite its manifest appropriateness to
climatic, social and economic conditions“ (Reference 57).
- This was one of the important forms of "cultural pollution",
said the Group for Studies on Iranian Problems in 1977.
- The Teheran newspaper Kayhan International wrote in 1978: "The
most acute problem in Teheran is its increasing division into
two cities: the neglected and decaying south and the opulent and
developing north". The north had beautiful, wide, tree-lined
boulevards, fine houses with gardens, and beautifully sculptured
buildings; the south had narrow and twisting lanes, pools of
dirty water and dilapidated and crumbling mud brick houses.

*** Vault and dome

The mud brick vault-and-dome building system evolved centuries
ago in West Asia. It was a response to necessity, for roof-
spanning materials such as timber and reeds became more and more
scarce as populations grew in the hot, semi-arid regions.
- Although in Iran and elsewhere in West Asia, mud-brick buildings
have reached an extremely sophisticated level, in public and
domestic architecture alike, they have in recent time been totally
neglected in fax-ur of Western architecture.
- As a result, highly-skilled traditional masons can no longer
 59

find work, and new apprentices are not being trained in indigenous
techniques. The skills are in danger of being lost altogether.
The Development Workshop in Iran, a small non-governmental group,
has for several years now been seriously studying the possibilities
of using the indigenouT building technology of mud brick vaults
and domes as a possible solution to low-cost housing in the
Third World.
- The Development Workshop researchers have found that concrete
and steel are imported at exhorbitant prices into many rural
areas of Iran. Reinforced concrete roofing puts the price of
housing out of reach of the majority. A corrugated iron roof is
less expensive, but without expensive air-conditioning it turns
the interior of the house into an inferno.
- "Sun-dried brick is probably the most widely available and
commonly used building material in the Third World" argues the
Development Workshop. "In regions such as Iran and'Egypt, where
timber and other organic materials are scarce, (vault and dome)
technology has been developed to a high degree and is capable
of spanning ail kinds of spaces."
- Vault-and-dome is the unique response of the ancient West Asian
architects to the fact that sun-dried mud brick has strength in
compression but not in bending or tension.
The traditional Middle East vault has the shape of an inverted
catenar . The catenary is the pure tension curve that a chain
4+ eavy rope takes when it is allowed to hang free, suspended
:; both ends.
- In Europe, vaulting always involved laying masonry over a wooden
framework, which was later removed when the vault became dry.
But in West Asian construction, no supporting formwork was re-
guired for fired or sun-dried brick.
- If sun-dried brick is used with mud mortar, the bricks fuse
together on drying, since they are of the same material. This
gives the vault additional strength.
- Mud brick's greatest advantage is its cheapness and availability.
A team of three men can make 2000-3000 hand-moulded bricks a day.
- A research and training workshop for upgrading the skills of
rural builders was organised by thYfi Development Workshop in 1977.
Builders from villages throughout Luristan province came together
to experiment with improvements to their 1OCni materials and
building technologies. Workshop participants included village
builders, architects and master builders from other regions of
Iran. Village housing problems were discussed, and the solutions
then tested in practice. Experiments were carried out on local
materials like timber, stone and mud brick; soils were tested
using simple sedimentation techniques that could be mastered by
any local builder. Stabilisers for mud brick and rendering for
improved earth walls against rain and wind weathering were deve-
loped for local soil types.
- Village builders were looked upon both as a valuable source of
60

In Herat, Afghanistan, a md-straw mixture is mixed on the ground and then

carried up to resurface the roof of a house. Photos: Sean Sprague
I

i
 61

arncrience
w--r-- ------ on indigenous building methods, and also an appro-
uriate cha.nnel for the introduction of improved indigenous
building techniques. Evening literacy classes were held so the
I village builders could keep their own records.
- A major criticism of mud brick vaults and domes by professional
architects in Iran is their susceptibility to earthquake damage.
- In most of the earthquakes that have struck Iran over the past
15 years, officials and architects have reported that mud-brick
houses were least resistant to earthquakes. Buildings with mud-
brick vaults were a major cause of the 25,000 deaths in and
around Tabas in 1978.
- In the Tabas region, most houses are single-storey structures
with beautifully vaulted roofs, supported only by mud-brick walls.
The inhabitants usually apply a new layer of mud to all the out-
sides of the village houses every autumn, so the vaulted roofs
can become a metre (3 feet) thick, weigh many tonnes, and easily
collapse under even small tremors.
- The Iran Development Workshop, however, counters this criticism
of indigenous buildings. Surveys in the Bandar Abbas and Zarand
areas, where earthquakes have occurred recently, have shown that
all types of building - whether built of stone, mud brick or
modern concrete - had collapsed during the earthquakes.
- In some cases people had used rounded stones to build their
houses. The stones were split into halves and laid onto a flat
mud surf ace, with mud packed between them. The stones were thus
simply piled one on top of the other. During an earthquake the
-walls disintegrated and collapsed in a heap.
- Mud-brick houses, on the other hand, t-ended to collapse much
more intact. This, the researchers explained, was because the
domes and vaults become a “kind of homogeneous mass”, which tends
to hold together as a single unit during earthquakes. Interviews
with people in Zarand.revealed that “the process of +.
colla se
mud-brick houses was much slower”, the Development Works op claimed.
- Poor foundations, openings in walls near the corners which cause
zones of weakness, short timber lintels for doors, and walls which
fell outwards during an earthquake, are all contributing factors
to earthquake-proneness, the researchers said.
- “We are not saying that by just improving the construction we
can make earthquake-proof buildings”, the Development Workshop
team said. “We’re just suggesting that by upgrading the local
buildings or improving the local building techniques, we can save
more lives .”

Afghanistan
In Afghanistan, settled villagers construct walls 30 feet (9 metres)
high without the use of scaffolding or shuttering, by hand-packing
a moist mud-straw-pebble mixture in horizontal layers 21 inches
(6 centimetres) deep. Three men can construct a 10 feet (3 metres)
high, 30 feet (9 metres) long wall in 16 hours.
- For floor and foundation designs, too, rural Afghans use stone
or adobe blocks covered with thin coatings of linseed oil,
instead of concrete slabs.
- Urban and rural Afghan houses use underground heating systems,
with floor ducts heated by hot charcoal. Construction is simple
and labour-intensive,
- Rafi Samizay, an Afghan architect, says that his country is
"blessed with a wide variety of vernacular architecture and folk
housing, which iscterised by a subtle balance between the
man-made form and the surrounding natural environment" (Reference
60).
- The common town house in the Herat region, for example, is made
of sun-dried mud bricks faced with a layer of fired bricks. An
additional layer of gypsum is plastered on the interior walls.
Climate control is achieved by elements like the central court-
yard, and by wind-scoops on the roof which funnel the cool north
wind down into the main rooms.
- "Afghanistan is still 9OP,rural and the country has hardly been
touched by 20th century technology, with the result that tradi-
tional buiidl,,, -n= methods arc not a part of history but a continuing
craft", says Rafi Samizay.

Pakistan
Pakistan, too, has evolved its own traditional building solutions
over centuries. Wind-scoops, for instance, are a prominent
feature of the lower Sind district in West Pakistan, where tem-
peratures range from 950F to over 120°F (35-49OC) between April
and June.
- Wind-scoops are installed on the roofs, one to each room to
channel the afternoon breeze, explains Bernard Rudofsky in his
book 'Architecture without Architects'. In multi-storied houses
the vertical ducts double as intramural telephones, a mechanism
which has been in use for at least 500 years.
- Thatta, 60 miles north of Karachi, is an old town with narrow
winding streets and several three-to-four storey mud and bamboo
houses. The walls of these 30-foot (lo-metre) h' h b 'ldings
'Id'
consiSt of nothing
nothinn more than small 2-inch (5-ceni!metyi)
(5-cen~!met~~l :nh!zk
thick
strips of wood and
an; bamboo covered with reed mats and caulked with
mud.
- Pakistan, unlike Afghanistan, is a relatively advanced country
in terms of modernisation and industrialisation. Ghulam Kibria,
former director of the Appropriate Technology Development Organi-
sation (ATDO), points out how difficult it is to get people to
accept even modern-looking low-cost housing solutions (Reference
62).
- ATDO's low-cost strategy was based on two basic concepts:
 63

* Burnt brick was replaced by blocks of soil stabilised

by adding either lime or cement, and pressing them
in a Cinva ram
* Hollow concrete blocks were used instead of solid ones,
which helped to save materials and provided better
insulation.
- Roofs were made with reinforced cement battens and slabs, which
had one limitation, that their span could not exceed 10 feet
(3 metres).
- ATDO built a low-cost house in Karachi in 1976 at half the
current construction costs. Two cooperative societies volun-
teered to adopt ATDO’s suggested system of construction. But when
detailed consultations were held, the president of one of the
societies, a prominent trade union leader, told ATDO that its
plans were unacceptable because they did not provide a drawing
room. “Where will the workers keep their sofa sets and TV?“,
he asked.
- “I was stunned”, wrote Kibria later. “What dawned on me that
day was that housing cannot be detached from lifestyle.”
- “Technology for low-cost housing is available”, says Kibria,
“and can reduce cost to half or even one third, but social
attitude kills the benefit obtained from the technology.” Housing,
he argues, has become a status symbol rather than a mere necessity.
- In its attitudes towards slums, at least, the Pakistan govern-
ment has slowly been changing away from low-cost housing and
site -and-services schemes which only benefit the middle classes,
to slum upgrading.
- Karachi has since 1975 taken the lead in Pakistan to legalise
land tenure in some of its ‘katchi abadies’ (literally, imper-
manent settlements, the local phrase for slums). Soms 1.6 million
people are estimated to live in the illegal slums of Karachi.
- Karachi is particularly suitable for slum upgrading and lega-
lisation of landholdings, because, unlike in many other Asian
cities, most of the urban land is government-owned.
China
Comparatively little seems to be known about China’s construction
industry and state of housing. But it is one Third World country
that has managed to provide every family with a decent, though
still very spartan, habitat.
- In 1974, a group of IJS architects, the first to visit China
since the Revolution in 1948, was told by Chinese architects that
building house s for the rural population had been a three-stage
process,
- In the first stage, simple shelter - typically a small house
with bamboo and mud walls - was made available to all.
- In the second phase, efforts were made to ensure that everyone
visiting team that “except perhaps in the small towns of the far
west” everyone was now living in a permanent building.
- In the third pha:. 13, new houses were to have more space per
family, with .individual kitchens and baths. As families move into
these, the older units were to be remodelled to meet the new and
better standards.
- Building materials in China come from various sources, and
housing designs vary according to the local materials available.
Traditional materials such as bricks, mud, timber and clay tiles
are used widely. Small factories and workshops produce building
materials like burnt bricks and lime from local resources.
- On the loess highlands of northwest China, says a 1973 Archi-
tects ’ Journal report (Reference 64), loess soil is used to bake
bricks in kilns, and on the outskirts of cities, industrial wastes
like furnace slag are used to make bricks.
- Mud brick is a major construction material in China. In a commune
near Sian, the capital of Shensi province, walls of houses are
mainly made of smoothed mud bricks. But the houses have a plinth
made of fired bricks which gives them a strong foundation and
protects them from erosion.
- The roofs are made of clay tiles on timber poles in a contem-
porary ‘modified shed-roof’ form, Single-storey houses, combining
traditional and modern techniques, and closely packed together to
save precious agricultural land, are typical of rural China.
- In China’s towns and cities, however, there has been a total
break with tradition. New houses are thoroughly Western inarac-
ter. TwcaW, they are closely packed three or four storey
apartment blocks with stereotyped layout patterns, which reduce
building costs to the minimum. In appearance, they are usually
monotonous and uninspiring. Brick, concrete and prefabricated
elements have frequently been used.
- Tha government in China is interested in further modernising and
industrialising the construction industry. Advanced foreign tech-
niques in construction are to be introduced and factory equipment
for building houses to be imported. The government hopes that
urban Chinese will have considerably improved living conditions
by 1985.

Egypt
Hasan Fathy’s book ‘Architecture for the Poor’, published in 1969
(Reference 66), was the first serious attempt to focus on mud
architecture.
- Fathy’s fascination with mud began when he was a young man,seeing
the peasants 1 homes on his father’s farms. “The peasant built his
house out of mud, or mud bricks, which he dug out of the ground
and dried in the sun... We, with our modern school-learned ideas,
 65

never dreamed of using such a ludicrous substance as mud for so

serious a creation as a house.”

- Fathy as a young architect started using mud as much as he

could. His first buildings, built in the late 193Os, had mud-
brick walls with timber roofs. But the ancient Egyptians did not
import timber, and their mud-brick vaults and roofs were built
without the support of any wooden beams or columns. Fathy tried
to do the same, but the vaults fell down.
- Then Fathy heard of craftsmen in Nubia (south Egypt) who could
build mud-brick roofs without any support. On his first visit
to Aswan to find such people, he discovered that “every man in a
village, whatever his usual job, was able to run up a vaulted
house for himself”.

- Close to Aswan, Fathy found the m-onastery of St Simeon, a Coptic

building of the 10th century. Its refectory, a 2-storey building,
was supported entirely upon an ingenious system of mud-brick
vaults. After a thousand years, this monastery is believed to be
the earliest surviving mud-brick structure to use vaults (arches)
to support an upper floor.

10th century Coptic church in As-wan, Egypt. Modern architect Hasan F&thy
uses the ancient technique of mud vaults to help solve the housing needs
of today.
Photo: Hasan Fathy
- "The solution to Egypt's housing problem lay in Egypt's history",
wrote Fathy. At Luxor, he found granaries built of mud b ricks
.
3400 years ago. At Touna el Gebel, he found more vaults, 2000
years old, one supporting an excellent staircase.
- "In one short tour", writes Fathy, "I had seen standing proof
of the prevalence of vaulting throughout Egyptian history, yet,
from what we had been taught in the School of Architecture I
might never had suspected that anyone before the Romans kngw how
to build an arch".
- The first use of mud brick for vaulted roof construction in Egypt
is believed to be in some early graves thought to date back more
than 6000 years. While the span of these vaults is less than 30
inches (76 centimetres) they use perfectly the method of all later
vault construction.
- Fathy finally found two craftsmen to build him a traditional
mud-brick vault. They used a special kind of brick, made with more
straw than usual, for lightness, and measuring 25 x 15 x 5 centi-
metres (10 x 6 x 2 inches). They were marked with two parallel
diagonal grooves, drawn with the fingers from corner to corner of
the largest face. These grooves were very important, for they
enabled the bricks to stick to a muddy surface by suction.
- The masons used no measure, but by eye alone traced a perfect
parabola, with its ends upon the side walls. "The whole vault
was built straight out in the air", wrote Fathy, "with no support
or centering, with no instrument, with no drawn plan. There were
Just two masons standing on a plank and a boy underneath tossing
up the bricks, which the masons caught dexterously in the air,
then casually placed on the mud and tapped home with their adzes.
It was so unbelievably simple."
- All that now remained was for Fathy to go out and apply the
methods of the Nubian craftsmen throughout Egypt. This proved
a difficult task.
- Eventually in 1945, he was given the job of building a whole
villa= for iOO0 peasants living near Luxor in a village called
Gourna. The Department of Antiquities wanted the villagers moved
as they had become entirely dependent on tomb-robbing for their
livelihood. The peasants were getting 50,000 Egyptian pounds in
compensation. About 1000 houses were to be built, which gave
Fathy Ef50 per house, a reasonable estimate if his method of
building mud houses was employed. But the department had allocated
nothing for roads, schools, mosques, and other necessary public
buildings and services.
- Fathy decided to use self-help. "We would make our own mud
bricks, we would build kilns, quarry stones, burn lime, bake bricks
for sanitary units . ..The village would, I hoped, show the way
to rebuilding the whole Egyptian countryside. Once it was seen
how cheap good housing can be, I hoped that there \iould be a great
movement of do-it-yourself building among the peasants."
- Fathy was to be greatly disappointed, The Gournis were not
keen to move. Proximity to the tombs gave them an easy liveli-
 67

hood, and they were loath to give it up. Far from playing an
active part in planning and building their own village, they tried
to sabotage Fathy’s scheme.
- From IZ.iS to 1948 it was a constant battle. Funds would flow
in too slowly and work would often grind to a halt. There would
be procedural objections to the purchase of raw materials such as
straw. Finally, Fathy gave up. He built several public buildings
and peasant houses, but the Gourna experiment failed and the
village was never completed.
- Fathy’s experiment left him bitter and disappointed. ‘What
interest can we expect a senior official to have in revolutionary
proposals, to commit his department to major schemes involving
untried techniques and unsound-seeming methods of finance? He
has achieved his position after a lifetime’s cautious progress up
the hierarchy, and now sits heavily at his desk, concerned only
to avoid mistakes .”
- Fathy still believes strongly in traditional materials, self-
help and cooperative construction. “One man cannot build a house,
but 10 men can easily build 10 houses”, he says.
- Fathy cites an example of what people can do by themselves -
and what government planners and architects cannot do for them.
When some villages in Nubia were to be flooded by the Aswan Dam
in 1934, the villagers had to build 35,@00 houses in the year
before their houses were submerged. Using mud bricks and vaulted
roofs, all the villages were completed “without the assistance of
a single architect or engineer. Self-help and local building
materials did everything .”
- “The villages turned out to be remarkably beautiful. Each viliage
had its own character and each house was different from the other.
The houses were spacious, beautiful, clean and roofed neatly with

Egyptian architect Hasan Fathy uses mud walls, domes, vaulting and other
traciitional Nubian techniques to design a mosque. Photo: Hasan Fathy
brick vaults. Each house had a large courtyard in front and a
guest room. The facades and doorways reflected peasant archi-
tecture at its best, exquisitely decorated with clolsterwork
tracery and mouldings ..!n mud.”
- The same region was reflooded in 1965, because of the Aswan
Yigh Dam. Professional architects were called upon to build the ,
new villages. They produced “one monotonous, flat roof house- ~
‘type built in stone and concrete”, says Fathy, “which was then
runeated identically all over the region. Because of the shortage
of”materials and labour provoked by this project, building acti-
vities were held up in the rest of the country. And when funds
were short, the architects simply responded by reducing the height
of the walls. The low roofs in the blazing desert sun turned
these stone and cement houses into ovens, and reports poured in
of increased infant mortality.”
- Even by standardising housing, says Fathy, architects and
planners are unable to reach the poor. A survey of 14 typical
villages in Egypt revealed that 27% of the rooms had no roof,
because the peasants could not even afford to buy reed stalks,
the most common form of roofing.
- Fathy’s work has attracted worldwide attention but he is sti.11
unrecognised in his own country. “We are all bent upon reducing
ourselves from super-Arabs to sub-westerners”, he laments.
- In 1980 the Aga Khan presented 80-year old Hasan Fathy with a
special $100,000 awar for his lifelong contribution to Islamic
architecture.

Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia has become a paradise for construction companies
from Holland, Britain, West Germany, USA, South Korea and Taiwan.
Construction expenditure was estimated at $11,845 million in 1978.
- This building b,,nnrn has produced a kind of architectural cola=
nialism. Designers based in Western countries make quick visits
T-ah, Riyadh, Dhahran or Dammanand then produce expensive
and unsuitable schemes in materials which have to be imported
almost to the last door handle and glazed tile.
- AMost of the local architecture is vanishing. The tall houses
in the centre of Jeddah which T.E. Lawrence saw in the 1920s have
been demolished. Their architecture was strongly influenced by
the harsh climate. Houses were set at odd angles in narrow streets
to catch the wind. Pots of water were kept on window sills to cool
the air that passed through.
- Saudi Arabia is mainly a Bedouin society, with few tangible
symbols of his torx. But few Saudis today seem to care about their
architectural heritage.
- Saudi vernacular architecture **is one of the most arresting in
the world”, wrote Dr Ronald Lewcock in the Financial Times in 1978
[Reference 70) .
 69

- “With few other material possessions to be proud of”, wrote

Dr Lewcock, “the sheikhs and merchants had evolved, after hun-
dreds of years of development, houses and forts with unique
qualities of strength, order and utility. They maintained these
largely mud-brick buildings in their pristine state by frequent
replastering and painting, which imbued the obviously perishable
materials with the qualities of human care and concern we normally
associate with the works of the potter or the sculptor.”
- This splendour was brought to an end by cement, now widely used
to coat old buildings, reducing them to anonymity. The final
blow came when land prices in the centres of old towns like Jeddah
and Riyadh began to rocket. Bulldozers came to provide space for
/’ inelegant highrise towers or flat-roofed international bungalows.
- Even in the remote rural areas, concrete buildings are creeping
in as mud houses are demolished. In the extremely compact towns
of the Al-Qasim region of north-central Saudi Arabia, traditional
building takes the form of solid blocks of 30 or more mud-brick
houses, connected via flat roofs and bridges (or qubbash).
- These houses are usually two or three storeys high. Their bricks
are made of mud mixed with wheat straw to resist moisture, and the
walls are plastered with mud which is also mixed with straw.
Limestone rock, or other local rocks, are used for the foundation
and supporting columns. Palm and tamarisk provide timber for the
roofs, doors and windows. Thus all materials used are available
locally. In this arid region, a mud house lasts for decades.
- But the Saudis seem unlikely to preserve their disappearing
heritage. And other, poorer, Arab countries are showing the same
contempt for their mud architecture.
- Saudi Arabia says it needs 338,000 urban housing units for
1975-80, compared with 75,000 houses built in 1971-75.
- But a UN study (Reference 71) points.out that the “present good
quality housing (a house of 200 square mettres is estimated to
cost $62,000) is beyond the means of the average Saudi Arabian
urban dweller”.
- The new houses are often uncomfortably hot. Insulation is
expensive and therefore avoided, and air conditioning has to be
paid for by the tenant, not the landlord.
Mud, particularly suitable for the Saudi Arabian climate, is
as a building material. Some work on bitumen-
d&p# mud has reportedly been done by the small-scale indus-
tries department of the oil company ARAMCO,but it has been little
used in Saudi Arabia.

The Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen)

Yemen is probably the only country in the world where one can find
find five or six storey houses made out of mud.
- These houses suit the climate as well as the local traditions.
 !

In rural areas these houses are usually made of compacted mud

reinforced by straw and cowdung. In urban areas, sun-dried mud
brick is used more extensively. And in the cities, the first
one or two storeys are made of stone and the higher storeys of mud,
- Western-type windows are now being purchased and introduced
in cities, but rural dwellings remain unchanged. Supports for
the floor, which were previously of rough timber and now increa-
singly of better prepared wooden beams, are becoming difficult
to obtain. In the Sana ‘a area, trees have been planted to produce
wood for construction purposes. A report prepared for UNESCO
states that more could be done in this way to help traditional
architecture.
- Money from Yemenis working abroad, particularly in neighbouring
Saudi Arabia, is now said to total $1.4 billion annually. As a
result, new houses are being built in virtually every village of
North Yemen.
- The government, however, only builds Western-type dwellings.
Housing is a major priority of the North Yemen government.
- Outside Sana’a, a Kuwaiti real estate developer is building
prefabricated houses, and a 2000-unit township is being built by
a Spanish company. The government is planning a second township
of about the same size.
- As most of the materials required for Western-style houses are
not locally available, extensive imports have become necessary.

Jordan
A construction boom is under way in Jordan. Land prices have
risen 2O-fold in the late 1970s. A great number of building
materials have to be imported, and the construction industry
suffers from scarcity of specialised labour and materials.
- All new housing in Jordan is of modern design along western
lines. Cement and cement-based products dominate the market.
- In the countryside, houses which were once built entirely of
mud are now being replaced by concrete, The government intends
to construct 36 new western-style settlements for farming commu-
nities, largely to discourage migration to cities. Jordan needs
at least 20,000 new houses per year for the next decade.
- In the next two years, the national cement company, which enjoys
a government-protected monopoly, will import 500,000 tons of
cement every year from Europe. Cement demand is rising at the
rate of 15% every year. Plans to build a second cement plant
have been approved, but its one million ton annual output will
all be exported to Africa.
- At present, there is a surplus of de luxe housing in Amman, and
a shortage of lower-cost accommodation. Even the cheapest concrete
houses cannot be afforded by unskilled urban workers.
 71
5
.
- Dr R.L. Sharif, director of the Royal Scientific Society in
Amman, says that studies in Jordan have shown that bitumen-
stabilised soil blocks would be technically suitable. But the
bitumen is sold by the local refinery at prices that makes its
use uneconomic.

Iraq
In 1957, ;9% of Iraq’s population lived in towns; by 1975 the
figure was 59%. Baghdad alone contains 40% of the country’s
urban population.
- Shanty-towns, lacking basic urban services, have grown up around
the cities. And overcrowded old dwellings in the heart of the
cities have become slums because of inadequate repair and main-
tenance. Two-thirds of Iraq’s urban population lives with more
than two people per room.
- The cost of a conventional low-cost house in Iraq is about
$12,000. A family incomes survey in 1977 showed that (assuming
a family shoull3 not purchase a dwelling costing more than three
times its annual income) a conventional low-cost house was beyond
the reach of 75% of all households.
- The 1965 ceh~~~s revealed that the main dwellings were brick
houses, mud houses and tents. Mud houses and tents accounted for
over 27% of the total dwellings. But, according to the Ministry
of Planning, these “are considered as substandard”.
- There is little effort to develop indigenous building materials.
For speed of production and public image reasons, Iraq is deve-
loping a prefabricated housing industry. Four industrialised
housing factories are being established using the French CAMUS
system.

Sudan
Mud houses are common in Sudan. In northern Sudan, David R. Lee
wrote in 1974 in the journal ‘Ekistics’ (Reference 74) : “Rooms
are covered by a flat roof of sticks and beaten earth. The walls
are built of mud - not mud bricks (as in Egypt) or rammed earth
(as in ancient Europe) but wet, sticky mud laid in successive
tiers. ” .
- “In Sudan this technique is called ‘alous, and is roughly com-
parable to cob construction of western*and. Wet mud, 18 inches
(46 centimetres) high and equally wide, is placed on the ground
and allowed to dry. When this tier has hardened a second is added
then a third and so on until a solid wall of mud has been built.”
- In the dry areas of northernsudan, jalous walls last for years
when they are protected with traditional plaster: a mixture of
mud, straw, and animal dung.
- And, says Lee, “the massive mud walls effectively reduce interior
temperatures during the stifling summer months, when daily maximums
above lOOoF (38OC) are not uncommon”.
- Most of the jalous houses in northern Sudan are single-storey
structures. But (writes Lee) there were some remarkable two-
storey houses as well, particularly in the Berber district.
These were said by local people to have been built about 70
years ago.
- “The uniqueness of these structures is that they all have walls
of some 18 feet (5: metres) high of solid jalous with no rein-
forcing elements: no bricks, no frames, no concrete to strengthen
the wall. For jalous to support itself above about 8 or 10 feet
(2;-3 metres) extreme craftsmanship is required lest the wall of
mud should topple. ” To provide strength, the walls are tapered:
thick near the ground and thinner towards the top. Impressive
buttresses of solid mud sometimes reach from ground to roof.
- Building costs are very high in the Sudan. Timber, stone, sand,
clay and asbestos are plentiful, but concentrated in a few areas.
Limited transport causes repeated shortages.
- Sudan imports 40% of its cement and all its ceramic tiles,
aluminium, zinc sheets, steel section, and kitchen and bathroom
fittings. These materials have to be ordered 6-12amonths in
advance and bought at exhorbitant prices on the black market.
A house built by contractors may take up to 5 years to construct.
Yet there is no serious effort to develop the local construction
industry.
- Sudan’s National Building Research Station has been trying to
improve local materials: burnt bricks, sun-dried bricks and
vaulted houses. But little has yet been done to apply these
experiments on a large scale.
- More recently, the UN Centre for Human Settiements (UNCHS) and
the UN Environment Programme have helped the Sudanese government
to start a $1 million project to produce asphalt-stabilised mud
blocks (‘asfadobe’).
- The project will involve a mobile asfadobe plant, producing 20
million bricks a year, as well as the construction of a settle-
ment of 200 houses for low-income families in Khartoum. Large
quantities of asphalt can be obtained within Sudan relatively
cheaply from the oil refinery at Port Sudan.
- According to UNEP! asphalt-stabilised earth is an ancient tech-
nique, first used in Babylon in 3500BC.
- In more recent times, asfadobe has been developed and promoted
by Hans Sump of Fresno, California, and used in some of the most
beautiful and prized homes in California.
- In Sudan, burnt bricks cost $20-32 per thousand. This means
heavy pressure on the country’s meagre resources of firewood; de-
forestation has already reached environmentally disastrous pro-
portions.
- Cement blocks are three times as expensive as burnt bricks.

.
 73

Locally-produced cement costs at least $85 a ton and imported

cement costs twice as much.
- By contrast, experiments with asfadobe bricks (2-4% asphalt
by weight is added to soil which is 40% clay and 60% sand) showed
they could be produced in the Sudan at $12 per thousand; the
price could probably be reduced further by mass production.
- “The dependence of low-income families on some form of soil
construction is likely to continue for several generations”,
comments Mr S. Karim of UNCHS. “The asfadobe technology, which
Sudan is in the process of developing, could serve as a model
for the rest of Africa , particularly for those countries with
oil refineries.”

Kuwait
Kuwait, which has the highest per capita income in the worl;l‘;
gives high priority to building and housing. A recent develop-
ment plan allocated 68% of total investment to housing.
- Kuwaiti housing policy, however, gives priority to Kuwaiti
citizens. The majority of foreign workers in Kuwait, who are
not allowed to own land, are poorly housed.
- Income distribution figures are not easily available in Kuwait.
But a study by UNEP and the UN Economic Commission for West Asia
estimates ‘that nearly 80% of wage earners in Kuwait cannot afford
to purchase the lower income housing type provided by the
Kuwaiti National Housing Authority.
- Before the oil boom, houses in Kuwait were made from sun-dried
mud pallets or lumps of coral rock taken from the shore. With
the disappearance of mud construction, the old art of making
thermally-efficient buildings has deteriorated, says the UN study.
- Poor insulation building materials have become a matter of
major concern to the Kuwait Institute of Scientific Research (KISR).
In the heat of summer up to 66% of Kuwait’s installed electricity
capacity, says the UNEP/ECWAstudy, is utilised for cooling.
- Iron and steel required for residential construction is largely
imported cram Japan. Since the rise in oil prices, the cost of
cement has increased by 4; times. The sand-cement block, which
is the most common walling material, “has now become too expensive
for most builders of homes”, says the UNEP/ECWAreport.

Algeria
Algeria plans to build a thousand new villages. The UN University
and the Algerian National Organ+sation for Scientific Research
are developing the world’s firs,t, integrated solar village, which
by the end of 1982 should be home to 1500 people. The houses,
near Bou Saada in M’sila province, conform to traditional commu-
nity lifestyles and will be built by local masons (Reference 76).
- The relationship of the village ~;~:~;~~ture to solar energy
use will be of special interest. solar energy systems
like solar hot water heaters will be used, but so also will -any
features of traditional Algerian architecture which constitute
a ‘passive ’ use of solar energy.
- For example, traditional houses are built with thick mud walls
to keep out the heat, with many small windows to let in breezes
but shut out the sun, and with indoor fountains for cooling.
The work of Professor Hasan Fathy of Egypt i> expected to influence
the architecture of Bou Saada.

Tanzania
In Tanzania, about 60% of all houses have walls partly or wholly
constructed from earth. This proportion is increasing, as many
of the traditional grass and pole walls in most of the remaining
40% of the houses are being replaced by earth walls.
- Brick and cement walls, or walls made with soil-cement blocks,
form only about 5% of house walls in Tanzania, and are found
mainly in towns.
- There are several reasons for this growing shift from grass to
earth walls:
* mud walls are more durable - there is no decay and
insect attacks are reduced
* sun-dried earth walls are load-bearing structures and
so no wooden poles are required to support the roof
* mud walls reduce temperature variations inside the house
* mud walls are cheap.
- -In 1977, President Julius K. Nyerere wrote (Reference 39):
We are still thinking in terms of international standards instead
of what we can afford and what we can do ourselves...It is no use
expecting the National Housing Corporation to supply all the houses
we need... Instead we should concentrate on b.'te-and-services projects,
so that people can build for themselves houses which are appropriate
to their income, and which can be gradually improved over time."

- Six Tanzanian housing officials wrote in 1978 (Reference 77)

that a village house is only considered good when built of concrete
blocks,witha corrugated sheet or flat concrete roof. “Even a
burnt brick wall has to be given a thick concrete plaster to give
it respectability”, they said.
The 1978 price for corrugated roof sheets alone for a 3 or 4-
iedroomed house was at least 1200 shillings ($135). Tanzania’s
per capita GNP was also 1200 shillings. “The building and con-
struction industry”, say the six authors, “exists only for the
monetised sector”.
- Tanzania has no official standard for traditional housing in
rural areas - where 95% of the population lives. And as the
Housing Bank gives loans only for improvement of houses of a
certain standard, it means that the bank in effect only grants-
loans to houses built mainly of cement.
- But banks do not usually like to give very small loans, and
they also demand collateral (security) which manyvillagers
cannot offer.
- The building regulations in force in Tanzania in mid-1978
were issued in 1930 with some later amendments. These rules do
not refer to traditional houses, locally available building
materials, new low-cost building methods, etc.
- The Tanzanian Building Research Unit has worked extensively on
low-cost housing and use of local building materials. It recognises
that soil is still one of the most important building materials
in Tanzania, and has carried out extensive tests on soil stabili-
sat ion bl- adding cement, lime or pozzolana, and on weatherproofing
mud walls.
- The BRU is trying to develop roofing materials to replace
corrugated iron sheets. One option is to use sisal-reinforced
concrete sheets, which are based on a local materials and could
be relatively cheap,
- In 1977, 85-908, of rural houses were built entirely of local
materials such as soil, wood and grass. And as more and more
land is cleared for agriculture or zoned off as reserve forests
or national parks, building poles, thatching grass and other
natural building materials are becoming scarce.
- Even in urban areas, houses are still being built with tradi-
tional materials. The BRU reported in 1973 that about 4000 new
squatter houses were being built in the capital each year - a
yearly growth rate of 24%. Most of them were built in the tra-
ditional manner, with mud, poles and perhaps plaster on the walls.
As the demand for bush-poles increased, so did their price, and
they are becoming harder to obtain.
- The 1977 BRU report (Reference 78) compared the costs of various
methods of building houses. The lowest costs were using mud, pole
af,p,~y5 t;r , closely followed by soil-cement and sand-cement
ut the latter produced much more durable houses, and
were cheaper over a period of years. The use of soil-cement is
spreading in Tanzania, especially in urban areas.
- Few Tanzanians have enough money to build a house all in one
stretch. “The erection is divided into a number of separate
tenders for which the potential house owner can hire various
fundis (local craftsmen). These will often hire their own
labourers if need arises, although the house-owner himself can
occasionally lend a hand. Erection of poles for walls and roof,
application of mud, plastering, flooring, fixing of roof sheets,
making the pit and the outhouse, etc can all be separate tenders...
Up to 9 different fundis might in some cases be hired for the
completion of a house”, said the BRU report (Reference 78).
- Mud, pole and plaster construction is well-adapted to this
stage-by-stage approach, which may extend over one or more years.
The owner can buy the poles and hire a fundi to erect them.
The poles cannot now be easily stolen, and the owner can wait
until he has enough money to buy the corrugated iron sheets.
Perhaps some months later when the roof has been finished, mud
can be applied to the walls. The house is habitable once the
doors and windows have been mounted. Later, the walls can be
improved by plastering and laying the floor.
- Houses built of blocks are better and more durable, but the
initial cost must include the full cost of the walls, floor and
the foundations.
- A 1978 Tanzanian national seminar on science and technology for
development noted with alarm that while the urban population was
increasing by at least 2.7% per year the housing stock was in-
creasing at only 0.5% per year. ‘“This makes the housing problem
in our urban areas very frightening.”
- Tanzania’s BRU has prepared a book to teach primary school-
children traditional building techniques, under the “Education
for Self-Reliance” concept. The difficulty, however, is that
Tanzanian schoolchildren are already overloaded with other self-
reliance courses.

Zambia
Soil-cement may not seem anything to sing about. But the people
of George, one of Lusaka’s largest shanty-towns, have a song:
Those of George
Have made bricks
Bricks
They call 'em soil cement
Nice ones
So thick and heavy
So cheap
So strong
Gob for building a house
Ooh for building a house.
- George is today one of the best upgrading projects in Africa:
an attempt to make the slum habitable for the people who live in
it. The philosophy is to help people to help themselves.
- It has not always been like that in Lusaka. The Zambia News
wrote in May 1970:
"The demolition of squatter compounds... is a necessary exercise which
has got to be undertaken. Our cities, and more particularly our
capital, must rid themselves of the scars of such squalid settlements,
thus x-moving the liability from the municipal authorities who are
doing their best to plan the most effective future building schemes...
"If these people living in these terrible areas which are, of course#
perfect havens for the criminal element,use more initiative instead
of sponging from the community to which they are contributing nothing,
they need not suffer in any way by being moved away from their hovels.
 77

"In a growing city or town there is no place for the layabout.

. Either he helps himself or gets out...".
- Essen&ially, this attacks the poor for being poor, and demands
that they go and live somewhere out of sight. Similar statements
are stili made with monotonous regularity-in many, if not most,
Third World countries.+
- This view is no longer held in Zambia. Seven years after this
vehement attack, the Sunday Times of Zambia, on May Day 1977,
carried a long story entitled: “Squatters: are they illegal
settlers on their own motherland?”
- Articles in the foreign press summarised the nation’s new
attitude towards slum-dwellers: “Zambia turns its squatters into
citizens” [Reference 81).
- What had happened? First, the government had moved towards a
people-oriented development strategy. Second, the government
had realised that it was illogical to have one policy for building
houses for everyone, and another for bulldozing those who had
somehow acquired a roof over their heads.
- Third, the government realised that slum-dwellers are not the
excrement of society, but in many ways its mainstay. They pro-
vide essential services to society very cheaply. As in any other
part of the Third World, those who build houses for others in
Zambia can seldom afford to build houses for themselves.
- The 1960s copper boom made Lusaka one of the fastest growing
cities in the world. By 1979, it was still growing at about 71%
a year, and its total population was over 500,000. Today, Lusaka
has 4 times as many citizens as it had less than 20 years ago.
By 1990, at present rates of growth, it will have over a million.
- By the turn of the century, half of Zambia’s population will
be living in urban areas. One in eight Zambians will be living
in Lusaka alone.
- Over 80% of the 1963-4 growth was caused by people moving from
the rural areas into Lusaka looking for work. They had no place
to go but to the shanty-towns. Lusaka’s slum and shanty-town
population was 17% of the city’s population in 1965, and 50% in
1970.
- The shanty-town George grew from 300 thatched huts in 1965 to
2400 dwellings in 1967. By 1973 it had 8584 houses, and by 1977
12,750.
- Between 1964 and 1974, Lusaka’s population increased by over a
quarter of a million. These people were calculated to need about
56,700 houses. But during that period the Lusaka City Council
built only 6934 houses, and about 12,500 officially-sanctioned
hou.t;es were built by others. Thus about 37,400 families needed,
but were not officially provided with, houses.
- During that same period, 27,000 houses .were built illegally in
so-called squatter settlements, almost 4 times the houses the
city council had been able to build. And, accordingto govern-
ment policy of the 196Os, these squatter settlements were all
supposed to be bulldozed away. -a
- In 1972, the ruling party, the SNDP, changed course. “Although
squatter areas are unplanned, they nevertheless represent assets
both in social and financial terms.” e
- The people in Lusaka’s squatter settlements are not layabouts:
over 90% of the people in George have jobs. In fact, in 1976
figures show that there were fewer unemployed in George (5.2%)
than in Zambia as a whole (11.3%).
- In 1976, according to a study by Robert Ledogar, the residents
of George were benefitting from government expenditure worth
475,648 kwacha ($600,000) through schools, health services, police,
food subsidy and municipal services. But they were paying K984,OOO
($l,ZOO,OOO) to the government, through income tax, personal levy
for employment, licences for trading, sales tax and excise duty.
- A publication released in the early 1970s called ‘Squatter
Manifesto’ said: “The true significance of the squatters is...
that being outside the law they have shown the irrelevance of the
law. They are evolving a new way of living that is related to
Africa, and not to local authority by-laws evolved by 19th-century
mn.”
- In 1975, the government started a $41 million upgrading project
with the World Bank, covering 70% of the squatter settlements.
It will:
* Upgrade 17,000 dwellings in 4 of Lusaka’s biggest
squatter townships: Chawama, George, Chaisa and Chipata
* Prepare 7,600 new plots in ‘overspill areas’
* Provide residents with technical assistance and small
loans to build or upgrade houses
* Provide community schools, health clinics, markets,
community and children’s centres, piped water, all-weather
access roads, street lighting and drainage.
- This is a self-help approach. The project estimates that it
takes K130 ($150) to service one plot and K400 ($500) to build a
core house with two rooms and pit latrine. The cost of a conven-
tional city council house (three rooms, kitchen and flush toilet)
is estimated at K6500 ($8iOo). The project provides a loan of
K400 ($500) and helps by bulk purchasing building materials.
- The community participates in planning the new township. For
instance, the community decides which families must leave the
township for an overspill area to make way for a road or to
reduce overcrowding, and provides free transport when they move.
- When the Lusaka squatter settlements began in the early 196Os,
they had a rural character, with sun-dried mud brick walls and
grass thatched roofs. The holes which had been dug to make the
mud bricks had been filled with refuse, or turned into corn osting
pits for vegetable or flower gardens. Sometimes banana -5izz
trees
 79

been planted on these pits. So most houses had a small garden.

- But by the end of the 196Os, many of the buildings looked more
urban: some had galvanised iron roofing, and others were made
of concrete blocks and stone.
- The Lusaka project is now promoting the use of compressed soil-
cement blocks for upgrading housed. There are several reasons:
* The price of soil-cement has grown relatively slowly
compared to other materials. Between 1st July 1975
and 1st April 1976 (nine months), prices of cement in
Zambia went up by 60% and of concrete blocks by 48%.
But self-made soil-cement blocks (14:l by volume) went
up only 30%.
* Soil cement is also cheaper. A three-roomed house built
with concrete blocks costs K240 ($300); one made with
purchased soil-cement blocks costs K130 ($160); but one
made with self-made soil-cement blocks costs only K90
($1101 l

* Making soil-cement blocks uses less time and energy

than burnt mud bricks, and they can be made by women.
* Sun-dried mud bricks are weak and dissolve in rain unless
protected by an overhanging roof and strong foundation.
Soil-cement blocks are strong enough for high buildings
up to three floors, and resist the weather.
* Soil-cement blocks are thicker than concrete blocks,
providing better insulation against heat and cold.
- Compressed soil-cement blocks are made with amachine called a
Cinva ram, made at the University of Zambia from a design ori-
ginally developed in Colombia. One ram is distributed to a
group of 5 houses, which passes it on to other households after
making their blocks.
- Many households have not liked the Cinva ram, which is slow
and makes very small blocks. Instead, they have used simple
wooden moulds to make soil-cement blocks, in a soil:cement ratio
of 5:1 instead of the 14:l ratio used in the Cinva ram.
- The Zambian National Science Council has developed a new machine
which, although it is rather expensive (K400; $500) is faster
than the Cinva ram, makes bigger blocks and uses less cement
(16: 1 ratio).
- Another Zambian group is trying to build houses in which the
corrugated iron roof is replaced with arches of soil-cement blocks.
The arches are built in the style advocated by Hasan Fathy of
Egypt. Another experiment involves houses made with sun-dried
mud bricks and plastered with sand and bitumen.
- Housing standards are an emotive issue in Zambia. Project
ofslclals claim that the Zambian authorities have adopted “realis-
tic” and not “idealistic” standards for the upgrading of squatter
settlements.
- Butthere is some criticism that these standards are far too low.
The upgraded squatter settlements still look like squatter
settlements, even though they now have roads, water supply,
lighting, schools and better constructed houses. It is alleged
that the Zambian elite is only upgrading squatter settlements
far from the prestigious town centre. Those settlements which
are close to it may still be removed entirely.

Kenya
According to Erica Mann of the Kenya Architectural Association:
“The planning authorities here - like in other developing coun-
tries of Africa - look upon mud and any other traditional buil-
ding materials, as a left-over from their past, and are not very
sympathetic to its re-introduction”.
- The Housing Research and Development Unit at Nairobi University
tried several years ago to test various processes of soil stabili-
sation, says Mrs e Mann. This was abandoned, mainly because of
lack of facilities and trained per=sonnel, but also because of
“the reluctance of local students to being drawn into this sort
.of ‘backward’ exercise”.
- Professor R.B.L. Smith of the Civil Engineering Department of
the University of Nairobi is currently working on sisal-cement
rendering of mud brick walls. He considers it will provide cheap
construction which will weather well and look good, as well as
being more hygienic than mud.
- UNICEF’s Village Technology Unit in Nairobi runs regular courses
in the production of compressed soil-cement blocks using Cinva
rams ; the rams are manufactured locally in Nairobi. The unit
trains instructors for Kenya’s rural polytechnics, who then are
expected to disseminate their information to the rural people.
- Mobil and other oil companies in Kenya have recently become
alerted to the potential of asphalt in the building industry, and
a conference was held in Nairobi in December 1979. A stable,
rapid-curing asphalt emulsion for the production of asfadobe is
now being made in Kenya and transported by tankers to a develop-
ment project in Juba, southern Sudan. A demonstration house may
be built soon in asfadobe, in Dandora, a 6000-unit World Bank-
supported site-and-services scheme in Nairobi.

Mozambique
After Independence, the Mozambique government declared urban
housing a national priority. But it found that even low-cost
housing was too expensive for most of its urban population. Such
houses usually go to the middle classes, especially civil servants.
- The Mozambique government is therefore encouraging self-help
traditional building materials. Efforts are being made to improve’
the design of traditional ‘pau a pique’ or cane houses. These
houses are built with a frame of wooden poles or canes, spaced
about 50 centimetres (20 inches) apart, with the gap filled by
stones and mud,
 81

- Pau a pique houses last only five years, but improvements are
being introduced which are expected to extend this to 30 years:
* a slightly raised base to improve drainage
* a ceiling to improve temperature control
* larger windows to improve ventilation
* walls coated with cement to preserve the mud and wood
* orienting the house north-south and painting it white,
to reduce heating.
- A three-bedroomed house of the improved type costs about $1,600.
But there are still two serious problems that have to be overcome:
protecting the wood from termites, and replacing the thatch with
a more permanent roof. Metal sheets are increasingly being used
as roofs, but they become very hot in summer.
- The Portuguese left behind a prefabrication industry in Mozam-
bique. The government is now trying to make best use of its
products’ as it does not want to dismiss the industrial workers,
no matter how inappropriate the products they are producing.
refabricated components are encouraged even in tradi-
;izzam pre-stressed roof beams , concrete slabs for kitchen
and bathroom sinks , prefabricated sinks and shower bases. .

- For upgrading Maputo’s canico areas (the ‘ciisle’ city), the

government is scouraging soil-cement blocks (Reference 81).

Ghana
Ghana has one of the most rapid rates of urbanisation south of
the Sahara. Its urban population is growing nearly twice as fast
as the national population increase.
- In 1970, 30% of Ghana’s people lived in towns with populations
over 5000’ The capital, Accra, grew by 40 % betwee 1970 and 1976.
- Most of the urban population is poor. Half the households in
Accra had an annual income less than 1900 cedi ($650) in 1977,
Few can afford to pay more than lo-1599 of their income on housing,
so their houses are largely built of traditional materials,
- Since Independence in 1957, Ghana has had many housing schemes -
but none has made any major impact.
- The two government housing corporations and the official Low-
Cost Housing Programme generated about 4000 new houses every year
between 1972 and 1976. These houses received high government
subsidies, but were still acqliired by relatively rich households.
- The 1975-80 Five Year Plan recognised that there had been “no
consistent direction in housing programmes for many years”.
- A large proportion of Ghana’s urban houses (54% in 1960 and 43%
in 1970) and most rural houses (94% in 1960) are made from a clay
material called ‘swish’ or ‘atekepame’.
- Compacted laterite (a well-weathered, iron-rich soil) is formed
into balls and laid in smoothed layers of about 13 feet (46 centi-
metres) . A swish house can last for 25 years or more.
- Swish was introduced to Ghana in the mid-1880s, but has never
been truly Ghanaian. It is built by itinerant builders, usually :
from neighbouring countries. Since the Aliens Compliance Act of
1969, the number of swish builders has decreased substantially.
- Swish, unless it uses stabilising materials, is now much less
used for new urban building. Many houses are now built of soil-
cement or sandcrete - laterite-stabilised cement at a ratio of
12:l to 24:l. Sandcrete blocks, manufactured by simple machines
in small factories, vary widely in quality.
- The UK Building Research Establishment took soil containing 6%
lime to make blocks in a Cinva ram at Kumasi. Walls constructed
with these lime-stabilised soil blocks show negligible erosion
after standing out in the rains for a year, while similar walls
of unstabilised soil blocks had eroded appreciably.
- Cement production severely limits the construction industry in
Ghana: cement products account for 30-60% of total building expen-
diture.
- The cost of a simple one-room house using sandcrete blocks and
asbestos-cement roofing sheets has increased by 170% since 1967.
This has made it more and more difficult for low-income earners
to buy a house. The same one-room house built with fired clay
bricks or sandcrete (stabilised soil) costs 15% less.
- The Ghanaian roof loan scheme provides loans for building mate-
rials to members of approved village housing societies.
- Low-income households are generally able to build their houses
using traditional techniques and materials, but cannot afford
the roof.
- Loans in 1970 averaged about $130 for a dwelling of about 260
square feet (24 square metres). But the roof loan scheme ran into
a high default rate, with one in three loans reported in arrears.
If the loan agency tried to sell the house, neighbours were not
willing to purchase it and contribute to the eviction of a fellow
villager. The security of the loan was thereby diminished and
the scheme has had little impact on rural housing.
- Ghana has probably done more research on traditiona~u~u~i.~ing
materials than other sub-Saharan African countries.
government has never planned seriously for their use.
- A.A. Hammond, chief technical officer of the Building and Road
Research Institute at Kumasi, wrote in 1973: “People will continue
to live in mud houses for some time...This being the case, govern-
ments of developing countries must undertake to help reduce the
deterioration of these houses and to improve their durability”
(Reference 84).
.
- Austin Tetteh, dean of architecture at the Kumasi Institute of
 83

Science and Technology, in a lecture during the 1976 UN Habitat

Conference , called for much greater use of local materials.
Third World countries were not going about this in the right way.
'IWe search for local sources of cement...establish cement fac-
tories and industries for the production of aluminium roofing
sheets. The fact that these materials are produced locally
reduces the cost by only a small margin.”
- “We have much to learn from the traditional methods of house
construction”, he continued. “The main problem with using mud
in house-building has been that it absorbs a lot of water and
collapses very easily. However, we have been able to protect
walls against absorbing a lot of water, and can build mud houses
which can stand for more than 50 years. If we look at this as an
alternative source of building material, I think it will go a long
way to solving our housing problems.”
- “If we are to enable our people to use local materials”, claimed
Tetteh, “then the elite, the planners, the people who have been
educated abroad or in the mould of the developed countries, have
to learn not to denigrate traditional materials” (Reference 86).

Nigeria
Nigeria is one of the wealthiest and most rapidly urbanising coun-
tries in Africa.
- “Solving Nigeria’s housing problems by just ‘building more houses’
is not only an over-simplification of the central issue, but it
is also easier said than done”, says Adenrele A. Awotona, lecturer
in architecture at the University of Lagos (Reference 87).
- Should the government try to build all the necessary houses
itself? “Until the petrodollar economy”, says Dr David Aradeon
bf School of Environmental Design, Lagos, “no Nigerian govern-
ment could have thought it possible to do so” (Reference 88).
- In 1975, the Nigerian government unveiled its massive 30 billion
naira (pi)($6 billion) Third National Development Plan. This
included a projected investment of W1.5 billion ($300 million) for
60,000 low-income houses.
- “To have invested that huge amount of money within such a short
period is proving to be an unworkable experiment.l.almost beyond
the meaningful financial capacity of the nation”, comments David
Aradeon.
- Nearly 80% of any construction project in Nigeria depends on
imported building materials. The Association of Housing Corpora-
tions calculated that the government would need to spend W3.8
billion ($750 million) to provide low-cost housing for all the
country’s urban poor. -
- Aradeon suggests that the role of the Nigeriangovernment should
not be to build houses but to stimulate people to invest their
own resources in building.
- The Nigerian government is now becoming interested in site-and-
services programmes, and upgrading squatter settlements, The
Federal Housing Authority, which is particularly interested in
the use of stabilised soil,has to import most of its cement.
- Kaizer Talib, an architect at the University of Lagos, distin-
guishes between two forms of traditional building in the tropics:
thick-walled mud buildings of the hot-dry regions and the bamboo,
palm fronds and mud-plastered buildings of the hot-humid regions.
Both these forms exist in Nigeria and exhibit distinctive cultures,
building forms, techniques and traditional use of materials
(Reference 90).
- Architect Stevens Ehrlich has (except for the concrete base)
used mud in the construction of the Ahmadu Bello University studio
theatre, together with domes and grass roofs.
- “Aesthetically, one need only recall the attractive mud buil-
dings of.. . Northern Nigeria to refute the notion that mud is ugly”
said an expert group on human settlements technology organised
by the UN Environment Programme in 1976. Skilled Hausa crafts-
men have used mud for palaces and houses.
- Talib has built a modern two-storey house to suit the warm
humid climate of Lagos. It has an upper floor with light concrete
walls. The lower floor,whose undulating walls are made of mud
reinforced with bamboo and reeds, is shaded by the upper floor,
so inner temperatures remain constant and the mud walls are pro-
tected from rain. Light bamboo screens give good ventilation
throughout the building.
- This is a rich man’s house. But construction through self-help
and family labour, and the use of mud and thatch courtyards could
help to make traditional buildings cheaper and climatically more
suitable.

Upper Volta
Ouagadougou was described as the ‘city built with mud’ by the
French colonial explorer Louis Gustave Binger in 1886. It still
deserves this nickname, for even today 40% of the people of Upper
Volta’s capital live in houses of ‘banco’ (wet mud) and timber.
- A 1973 UN project for low-income housing concluded that the use
of timber for building was clearly irrational in Upper Volta.
Wood, the main source’of energy in the country, is extremely scarce
and is also attacked by termites.
- O.D. Ouedraogo of the Voltan Centre for Scientific Research
(CVRS) supports the use of local building materials and popular
participation in construction. “This is in no way a fantasy of
returning to building idealised precolonial dwellings”, he argues
(Reference 92). Banco, he says, is the only solution.
- The Ministry for National Education used stabilised and compacted
earth for 200 dwellings for schoolteachers. Thus, believe.;;
Ouedraogo, “every schoolchild is impregnated with the idea that
 85

mud is an acceptable building material”.

- The Centre for the Research and Application of Earth Technology
(CRATERRE)of Haut Brie, France, has collected over a thousand
publications on earth construction, and its experts have built
over 40 earth houses. CRATERREis currently involved in Upper
Volta and Maurit’ania with what it claims are “the two biggest
earth construction programmes in Africa”.
- The Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt, West Germany, is compiling
a record of the various forms of mud architecture in Africa to
form part of an ‘Atlas Africanus I, a comprehensive documentation
of African cultures.
- Centuries-old mud monuments can still be found in Upper Volta,
Mali, Benin, Niger, Nigeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Libya. They
reveal the power and wealth of Africa’s kingdoms, many of which
were as wealthy and technologically advanced as European countries
until the end of the Middle Ages.
-~ “We have set out to record an important testimony to African
creative powers before these buildings vanish”, comments Professor
Eike Haberland, director of the Frobenius Institute.

Mud can be extraordinarily versatile. Mud walls and woven grass roofs
form a series of huts and family yards in Upper Volta.
Photo: Sean Sprague

I
Adobe building reached a peak of variety and magnificence in Peru where the
cathedral in Lima is said to be the largest mud building in the world,
Above: a typical adobe courtyard and, below, Torre Tagle Palace, Lima.
 87

Latin America
The World Bank estiriiated in 1970 that 55% of the people in Mexico
City and 47% in Bogota could not afford to buy the simplest
modern house - even if no deposit were required,mortgage repayment
was spread over 25 years, and interest rates were only 10%.
- The slums and shanty-towns use little or no manufactured
materials to build their homes. Self-constructed houses are main1
made of cardboard, wood, sheetmetal and occasionally clay roo + ing
tiles. Any materials thathaveto be paid for are purchased slowly
over a period of time.
- What is the future for housing in Latin America? The potential.
to meet everyone’s needs is there, as a study on human settlements
in Latin America conducted by the International Institute for
Environment and Development (IIED) in London points out (Reference
93).
- “The land exists; the resources exist to fabricate the construc-
tion materials... professionals abound...The ‘Problem’ of human
settlements is, after all, the problem of poverty.”
- Mud houses are very common in the Venezuelan and Colombian Andes.
The peoule there have uked the rammed earth method for construc-
ting walls for centuries. Wooden frames are used to hold successive
3-inch (8-centimetre) layers of a slightly moist mixture of small
stones and mud, which are rammed down with a 4 x 4 inch (10 x 10
centimetre) wooden post, Non-organic soil with a high clay con-
tent must be used.
- The richest tradition of using adobe (sun-dried mud) as a buil-
ding material comes from Peru, a country with an extremely dry
climate.
- A. Hyatt Verrill wrote in 1930 (Reference 94): “In no part of
the world . ..has adobe construction reached such a state of
development and attained such heights as in Peru. Long ages
before the Soaniards first set foot on Peruvian soil. the Incas
and the pre-&an tribes had learned the use of mud as a building
material. Enormous walls, great mounds, countless dwellings,
vast temples, and massive forts were built of sun-dried mud bricks
and blocks and many of these still remain, little altered by
time and elements .”
- “The Dons followed their example and used the cheap and easily
obtainable adobe in erecting their buildings”, he continued.
“Their palaces, forts, homes and churches were made entirely of
mud, and through the centuries these have endured and remain today
as imposing and as beautiful as in the days of Pizarro.”
- “The world’s largest mud building, the old Lima cathedral, is
built of adobe blocks without reinforcement of any kind. But it
now has a concrete coating at the base of its walls.”
- “Wherever there is available mud, one will see the r!atives
industriously engaged in making adobe bricks”, wrote Merrill in
1930. “The mud, dug from any convenient spot, is mixed with sand
and usually with some chopped straw or dried manure. The resul-
tant pasty mass is then pressed into wooden forms or frames. The
shaped blocks are then removed and placed in the sun to dry and
in a day or two are ready for use.”
- “The penniless brick-ma.ker needs little more than his bare hands.
With his wife and children, and his worldly goods...he camps upon
the selected site . ..In a few days the brick-maker and his family
are surrounded by brick walls . ..Here they remain as long as bricks
can be made and sold on the land.”
- Few rich people in Lima today build adobe houses, but the poor
still use mud as the most important building material, especially
in the squatter settlements.
- The Cinva ram, which has now been used in several places in
Africa to make compressed soil-cement blocks, was first developed
in Latin America at the Inter-American Housing and Planning Center
(CINVA) in Bogota, Colombia, in 1952.
- The University of Kassel in West Germany has developed a special
type of shuttering that allows a rammed earth wall to be rein-
forced by vertical bamboo sticks, a type of wall which in Guate-
mala has proved to be earthquake-resistant.
- Impravements have also been made to a traditional construction
method from Latin America known as ‘bajaraque’, in which clay is
filled into a skeleton bamboo structure.
- The West German aid agency- GTZ has been working in El Salvador
“to build solid and cheap houses made of soil for the poorest
inhabitants in self-help work”. Here, extensive deforestation has
caused an acute shortage of timber and thatch. Several demonstra-
tion houses have been built using lime-stabilised soil bricks
which are said not to show any appearances of dissolving even
after a month in a water bath.

United States
Individuals in the USA have for a long time talked about using
adobe as a building material on an extensive scale, but have
never had much success. The reasons have been similar to those
advanced today in developing countries (Reference 95).
- In April 1924, an article in’scientific American’described how
an experimental house was being built in Kansas City using the
rammed earth or pise technique imported from Europe. Juanita
Porter listed the manifest a.dvantages of pise as a building
material: extreme cheapness, untrained labour, saving in trans-
port costs since soil is always near at hand, comfort, cooler in
summer than brick, warmer and easier to heat in winter, practi-
cally indestructible, low upkeep, practically fireproof.
- In December 1942,‘Business Week’described a Detroit cooperative
formed to make houses using rammed earth. Its members were
mostly factory workers and followed Egyptian Hasan Fathy’s argu-
ment that while one person cannot build a house, ten persons can
 89

build ten houses. “Work at night under impromptu floodlights is

not uncommon”, reported Business Week. The pooled labour made
the houses far cheaper than orthodox brick, and stone and wood.
- Frank Lloyd Wright designed several luxury houses built in adobe
around that time. One in El Paso, Texas, blended into the desert
environment with piles of sweeping sand all around it,
- “We lived in a rammed earth house”, wrote Robert Cook to The
New Republic in September 1943. “How do I know that my house of
earth won’t fall around my ears the next time it rains? It hasn’t
yet and there have been many good downpours since 1928 when we
moved in. In fact, the first night . . *we had 8 inches (200 milli-
metres) of rain driven by a near gale. I didn’t sleep much that
night, but the earth walls stood. They have stood ever since.
- “If the time ever comes when the American people at last make
up their minds to cut through some of the vested interests and
accumulated nonsense surrounding housing and really have low-cost
houses, then rammed earth is going to be an important element”,
wrote Cook (Reference 97).
- The vested interests which Cook talked about-in 1943 were “the
‘thumbs down’ of the building trade and the house-financing trade,
and the veto of no building permit” - the same interests which
still militate against the use of earth in the Third World as
well a. the USA 1, I were ever to have a house cf earth I
would have to build it myself and finance it without benefit of
building-and-loan”, wrote Cook,
- Several state universities, the US Department of Agriculture,
the US Bureau of Standards, and the US Indian Service have issued
publications on rammed ear:h and other forms of adobe construction.
- Based largely on this work in the 1940s and earlier, the US
Agency for International Development (AID) published ‘Earth for
Homes1 in 1955 (Reference 99). In a spirited introduction,
AID said:“War, preparation for war, great migrations, and many
other reasons.. . (have) resulted in a revival of earth home
construction, as evidenced by its widespread use, for instance
in Australia where over 9000 earth wall houses were recorded
as far back as 1933...“.
- Around the same time, AID released another report: ‘Handbook
for Building Homes of Earth’ (Reference 99). “It is possible,
even with a little skill, today to build a beautiful, inexpen-
sive and durable home using the oldest construction material
known, the earth around us”, said AID.
- But mud has seen the revival which AID hoped for in the 1950s
neither in the developed countries nor in the Third World.
- But with soaring energy costs, that may be changing. Adobe is
becoming a subject of greater interest. In December 1974, soon
after the first oil crisis, ‘Adobe News’ started in New Mexico.
- Its fi.rst editorial said: “There is no better material with
which to build a home in the southwest than earth bricks: cool
in summer, warm in winter, soundproof from one room to the next,
solid yet married to the earth from which it springs, an adobe
generates a way of life in harmony with those human values we
all sense as righteously desirable”.
- Today, hundreds of adobe houses are being built in the USA
each year.
- New Mexico has drawn up an adobe buildings standards code, and
New Mexico State University has begun an adobe design and con-
struction course.
- Recently, under President Carter, US Assistant Secretary of
Agriculture Alex Mercure called for “relatively simple guide-
lines for financing of homes built with adobe”. He called for
federal “committment to the use of adobe as well as other less
conventional materials which are cost effective”.
- The white population may now be making up its mind about adobe.
But the indigenous peoples of the USA have always used mud for
buildings, and admire it even today.
- The Hopi, Zuni, Acoma and other Pueblo Indian tribes live in
the semi-desert plateaux of Arizona and New Mexico. Their pueblos
are 3 to S-storey buildings, with numerous rooms - sometimes
hundreds. Each flat-roofed and terraced upper storey is set
back from the lower one, but with one multi-storey perpendicular
wall at the rear.
- The pueblo is an additive and cumulative b_uilding structure
that accommodates more or less people as new additions are made
or dilapidated sections are demolished.
- The thick walls of the pueblo are built of adobe brick or stone
laid in adobe mortar. The walls are plastered with clay mud,
and the interior is whitewashed with fine white clay or decorated
in colour.
- A roof is made from cedar beams about one foot (30 centimetres)
in diameter, laid with small poles, followed by brushwood, grass
and a 3 to 4-inch (8 to lo-centimetre) coat of adobe.
- The main floor beams are precious building materials in an
arid region. They are constantly re-used and the excess length
sticks out beyond the exterior wall to give the pueblo a charac-
teristic appearance.
- The Pueblos areamongstthe few US Indian peoples which have
managed to retain their culture and their traditional housing
systems. Other tribes which have changed their ways are now
reported to be keen to revert to their own traditions.
- The Arizona Daily Star reported in December 1977 that the
Papagos Indians want to go back to houses which use their ancient
building techniques and design. A survey had shown that most of
the Papagos were unha with the houses that the US overnment
::~~~~l~i~~u:~ro~h~~~~~~e comment was: “It makes usgsick to.
It gives us colds in the winter time”.
 91

- The Papago Tribal Council hired an architect, George Myers, to

design a low-cost model house that the Papagos could build them-
selves. He designed a rammed earth house in which the earth had
been stabilised by adding 8% cement.

Britain
Europe, despite its cold and wet climate, has had a long tradition
of earth houses. Earth buildings can still be found in England,
Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Scandinavia and Greenland.
- There is an old saying in Devon, England: “All cob wants is a
good hat and a good pair of shoes”. Cob is an English term for
mud mixed with chopped straw, lime and sometimes a little aggre-
gate (small stones),
- Walls of cob buildings were kept dry by a generous roof overhang
usually made of thatch (the hat); a waterproof plinth would
be made to protect the walls from ground damp (the pair of shoes).
- The composition of these plinths varied from region to region:
stone and pebbles in Devon, flint and bricks in Norfolk.
- Building incob was a living craft until recently in many parts
of Britain, p articularly in Devon and South Wales. Sometimes
lime-stabilised mud blocks were also used and they were extremely
sturdy.
- But despite its qualities of strength and thermal comfort, mud
could not withstand the onslaught of modern building materials.
In Victorian England, mud block was gradually relegated to being
a poor man’s material. Householders anxious to display their
affluence would build all their walls of mud except those facing
the road, which would be of brick. An observer at the turn of
the century noted that half the “brick” cottages in Norfolk were
in fact built of mud underneath their ‘skin’.
- The decline in popularity of mud was temporarily reversed after
World War I. British architect Clough Williams Ellis wrote a
book in 1919 called ‘Building in Cob, Pise and Stabilised Earth’,
which still remains one of the best technical works in this
field (Reference 104).
- In 1920, the UK Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries built a
number of cottages using various types of building materials
available on site, inclilding mud, on the outskirts of the village
of Amesbury in Wiltshire.
- The technique used was mainly the rammed earth construction
technique; the local soil used had a varying proportion of chalk
in it. Most houses had overhanging roofs, and the foundation
walls made of brick and concrete rose in some cottages to about
one foot (30 centimetres) above the ground,
.
- A review of these houses by the Department of Architecture at
the University of Cambridge in the 1970s noted: “The houses,,,
have remained in very good condition except in some minor details
 . ..The chalk pise (rammed earth) walls appear very sound even
though the rendering is missing in places”.
- “The maintenance”, the report pointed out, “that had been
necessary for the houses visited was no more than would be
expected in any SO-year old house”.
- The people living in these houses said that because of the
thick chalk walls, they had installed smaller heating systems
and had lower running costs “than in a conventional 275mm cavity
brick house”. One owner pointed out that “the damp was nothing
compared to the damp patches (from condensation) seen in the
brick council houses opposite”.
- The study concluded: I’.. . The success and teachings of the Ames-
bury experiment provide good grounds for further thought on
building houses of earth”.
- The Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) operates
a workshop in Warley, West Midlands, which has helped the Bicton
Agricultural College in Devon develop a method of waterproofing
mud brick walls by coating them with a glass-reinforced cement.
A store for the Westbrick Company in Exeter has been built with
this technique which has stood well despite two winters of heavy
snow and severe frost. Stud,ies are now being made to see to what
extent it saves energy.

Mali mud granaries are protected from rain by an overhanging grass roof,
and stand off the ground to avoid floods and rising damp. (Note the
simple ladder for repairing the roof.)
Photo: Sean Sprague
 93

CHAPTERSIX

If there is one problem in the world to which no satisfactory

answer exists, it is housing in developing countries.
- This document has not been written with any romantic notion
about earth buildings or about living in harmony with nature.
- Traditional building materials like earth are important because
nearly half of the world’s population today lives in earth buil-
alngs.
- Conventional houses arm so expensive that it is unlikely that
people who now live in earth houses will be able to move out of
them for decades to come. Millions more will have no choice
but to move into ramshackle huts made of cardboard, tin cans,
sacking or any refuse material they can find.
- With inflation and rising energy costs, the price of conven-
tional materials such as cement will probably continue to increase
faster than the purchasing power of the poor. In other words,
it is possible that an even smaller proportion of Third World
citizens will be able to afford conventional housing in the
future t”han at present.
- In mal’iy Latin American countries, by the early 1970s.it was
not posf;ible for an industrial worker with an average income to
afford the lowest-cost dwelling without a substantial government
subsidy.4 The rural peasant was far worse off.

Figure 6: Housing costs and income levels in Latin America,

early 1970s [in US dollars) Source: Reference 16

Minimum income Annual income

Lowest-cost required for of manufacturing
Country dwelling purchase worker, 1973

Bolivia 4000 1920 731

Colombia 5135 2465 858
Ecuador 1000 480 915
Guatemala 5500 2640 975
Guyana 3705 1778 1000
Argentina 3000 1440 1406
Mexico 3440 1651 2114
Venezuela 5700 2736 3050
- Where large housing programmes were launched with government
subsidies, benefits went largely to the rich.
- Traditional construction techniques and materials offer one
new approach,
- Greek architect Constantin Doxiadis once calculated that only
4% of the world’s buildings had received any input from trained
designers. But little is known about the ‘non-pedigree’ archi-
tecture which is responsible for the othermf buildings. It
doesnot even have an accepted name: vernacular, anonymous, spon-
taneous, indigenous architecture.
- Even though interest in housing programmes for the poor is
growing, any widespread or sustained move from modern to tradi-
tional building materials has yet to take place.
- Why do the poor not want to live in mud houses? Why do they
prefer to move into substandard and uncomfortable modern houses?
- Housing is not a high priority for the poor of the Third World.
In tropical countries, unlike the rich temperate countries,
shelter is not a prime physical necessity. Food, jobs, water,
clothes and health services are more important. This is especially
true of the rural poor; even for the urban poor, the quality of
a house is less important than a house which provides easy access
to jobs.
- Economic gain as well as status induces the poor to want to live
in permanent concrete houses. As time goes by, the value of a
rich man’s concrete house and the land on which it is built
increases, especially in the urban areas. A concrete house is
an investment, which often increases even faster than inflation.
- But a poor man’s thatch and mud hut crumbles and decays with
time, and its value continually drops.
- So far as housing in the Third World is concerned, the rich
man becomes richer and the poor man becomes poorer.
- Cement is in many ways similar to electricity. Its use is con-
centrated in towns and among the rich.
- Bangkok, with under 10% of Thailand’s population, uses 85% of
the nation’s electricity. An urban Indian uses 28 times more
electricity than his cousin in a village.
- The same is true of cement. The average Indonesian uses only
25 kilograms of cement each year, but the average citizen of
Jakarta consumes almost 125 kilograms. A Dane uses over half a
ton of cement a year.
- An Indian uses only 24 kilograms of cement a year while a Dane
uses 22 times more - over half a ton.
- The era of cheap ene--gy is coming to an end. This is forcing
governments, industry and individual people all over the world
 95

to reconsider their energy policies. Britain is switching from

imported oil back to home-mined coal. And throughout the Third
World the poor are being forced to shift from kerosene (paraffin]
to firewood and charcoal.
- The cheap cement era - itself a product of cheap energy - is
also coming to an end.
- Energy planners are looking again at simpler technologies and
more traditional energy resources.
- And housing planners may have to consider new building materials
and technologies, and reconsider traditional materials such as mud.
 :;I"" I,,:', +;,,.i",";j .. 'I,.
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REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Global Review of HumanSettlements, UN Conference on Iluman Settlements,

Vancouver, 1976, A/CONF.IO/A/l
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3. Financing cities in LDcs, Roger S. Smith, Finance and Development, Vol II,
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Hardoy, SCOPE, International Council of Scientific Unions, 1976
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8. urbanisation, World Bank, 1972
9. Housing, World Bank, 1975
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for Environment and Development, London, 1979
11 .The Significance of Rural Housing in Integrated Rural Development, United Nations,
New York, 1978
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R.P. Misra, B.S. Bhooshan & P.D. Mahadev, Institute of Development Studies,
University of Mysore, India, 1975
13. ExpUlSiOn and Exclusion in Sao Pa&o, Richard Batley, Development Research
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14.Science and Technology Transferred by International Agencies in the Field of Housing:
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32.Strategfer for Development of Cement and Allied Industries in Developing Countries,
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Earthscan, London, 1979
 97

33.wergy conservation for Fossil Fuel for mess developed Countries, Jose Goldemberg &
Robert Williams, 1978 (in press)
34,Joint UNEP/ECWA mission report on human settlements technoiogy in the
ECWA region, 1977
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ments (UNCHS), Nairobi, 1979
58.~eyional Paper for Western Asia, Prep. Corn. for the UN Conference on Science
and Technology for Development, A/CONF.8l/PC.l8/Add.l, UN, 1979
39.The Arush Declaration: Ten Years After, Julius K. Nyerere, Tanzania Publishing
House, Dar es Salaam, 1977
40:z~king an all-roi;sd attitude to science, An interview with Indira Gandhi, Nature,
Vol 285, No 5761, London, 1980
41 .Prolonyfny the life of earth buildings in the tropics, A.A. Hammond, Building and
Road Research Institute, Kumasi, Ghana, CP/4/73, May/June 1973
42.Indigenous Building and the Third world, F. Afhshar, A. Cain, M.R. Daraie & J.
Norton, Development Workshop on Indigenous Building Methods in the Third
World, Teheran, Iran, 1976
43..ww-~ost Sousing in the Indian Context, Surya Kant Misra, Overseas Building Notes,
No 172, Building Research E*+ahri=hmPnt.
a*- ---- ________,Watford UK, 1977; Sarvatogriha,S.K. Misra,
Central Building Research Institute, Roorkee (in press)
44. Problems of Shelter, Sanitation, Transportation and Air Pollution: ESCAP reyion, R.S.
Mehta, seminar on alternative patterns of development, Bangkok, 1978,
organised by ESCAP-UNEP, Nairobi
45.Appropriar~ Technologies and Materials for Sousing and Building, Central Building
Research Institute, International Forum on Appropriate Industrial Technology,
New Delhi, UNIDO, 1978
46.nudArchltecture in iiural India, B.S. Bhooshan, Institute of Development
Studies, Mysore, 1978
47.Dsmonstration Low-Cost Houses, Central Bul'11:
,,,ng Research Institute, Roorkee, India
48.A New Technfque for Waterproofing Mudwall. M. Aslam & R.C. Satiya, Development
Digest, Vol 14, No 2, Washington DC, 1976; Non-erodable Mud Plaster, Science for
Villages, Wardha, India, March 19?9
49. Aural Housing in India, K.K. Khanna 5, A.C. Mannan, National Buildings Organisa-
tion (NBO), New Delhi; R c D in the field of Rural Housing and Village Planning, NBO,
New Delhi; A Dream Comes True,NBO, New Delhi, 1976
SO.Case Study of Building Materials and Buildiny Techniques, Appropriate Technology
Development Association, Lucknow; International Forum on Appropriate Indus-
trial Technology, New Delhi, UNIDO, November 1978
51. Rural India: Village Houses in Rammed Earth, Popposwamy, Dienste in Ubersee,
Stuttgart, 1979
!52.~overty, Unemployment and Development Policy: Kerala. UN, New York, ST/ESA/29, 1975
53,Perfornnnce Approach to Cost Reduction in Building Construction,Government Of Kerala,
India, 1974
S4.Editorial in Nai Duniya, 6 June 1979, quoted in Paryavaran, Gandhi Peace
Founaation, New Delhi, August 1979
55.Choice of Appropriate Construction Technology in the Building Industry in Iran, F.
Neghabat, International Forum on Appropriate Industrial Technology, New
Delhi, November 1978, UNIDO, Vienna
S6.The Potentials of Indigenous Building Technologies, Farroukh .4fshar, Allan Cain,
Mohammad-Reza Daraie & John Norton, Communications and Development Review,
Iran Communications and Development Institute, Vol 1, x0 4, 1977; Indigenous
Building and the Third world, A. Cain, F. Afshar & J. Norton, Architectural
Design, London, April 1975; Traditional Cooling Systems in the Third World, A. Cain,
F. Afshar, J. Norton & 81. Reza Daraie, Ecologist, \‘ol 6, No 2, UK; rn defence
of a return to traditional technology, Kayhan International, Teheran, 4 March 1978;
guallty buiiding: the way to beat earthquakes, Ralph Joseph, Kayhan International,
Teheran, 13 August 1978
57.Eottlenecks in the Adoption of Appropriate Technologies: Iran,Ron Alward & Robert
McCutcheon, Communications and Development Review, Iran Communications and
Development Institute, Teheran, Vol 1, No 4, 1977
 38

58,Mohammad Djahanfar, Kayhan International, 23 July 1978; The moving tale of

Teheran's tvu cities, Kayhan International, 20 August 1978; study group warns of a
culture crisis, Kayhan International, 11 June 1977
S9.Dr James Brander, New Scientist, 28 September 1978
60.Rafi Samizay, Ekistics 227, 1974
61.Mark Frederickson, Arid Lands Newsletter, University of Arizona, Tucson,
No 7, 1978
62.Ghulam Kibria, Pakistan Economist, Karachi, 17 March 1979
63.Emiel A. Wegelian, Pakistan Economist, 13 January 1979; Dr Yap Kioe-Sheng,
ibid.;Shaista Usmani, ibid.
64.tiousing: modern China, Architects' Journal, 19 8 26 December 1973; HOWChina builds
housing for 700 million peasants, Li Shao, Ta Kung Pao, 29 September 197?;Large-scale
housing projects underway in Peking,Hsinhua News Agency, 23 September 1977; Walter
Wagner, Architectural Record, New York, September 1974
65.urbanissu en China, Cidiu, Documentation e Information sobre Vivienda de1
INDECO, Vol 2, No 7, Mexico City, 1979
66..irchirecrure for the POOP, Hasan Fathy, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
1969; comprehensive Bssign for Rural Living, Hasan Fathy, paper presented to 134th
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington
DC, December 1969; Rural Settlements in Developing Countries, Hasan Fathy (unpublished);
Renwrandum on the creation of the International Institute for Appropriate Technology, Hassan
Fathy (unpublished); Rud-Brick Roofs, Ideas and Methods Exchange No 42, Dept of
Housing 2nd Urban Development, Washington DC, Kiir-c:rlL 1957; Islamic Cairo,
-_ piprrctte Pcpggwski, 'i'l~pY.YO festiiies, pai.is
67.Study of the Feasibility of Combating Besertification through Integrated Regional Develop-
ment by Combining Industrialisation and Urbanisation with the Development of Agriculture,
UNEP, Nairobi, 1979
66.Gwen Nuttall, Sunday Times, London, 10 September 1978
69.James Buxton, Financial Times, London, 22 January 1979
70.Dr Ronald Lewcock, Financial Times, 20 March 1978; Ahmed A. Shamekh,
Ekistics 258, 1977; David Shireff, Middle East Economic Digest, London,
January 1979
71.Ro-cost Housing, Yona Friedman, seminar on Housing for Low-Income Families in
the Arab Region, November 1977, UNESCO, Paris; Report of the seminar on
Housing for Low-Income Families in the Arab Region, Cairo, November 1977,
UNESCO, Paris
72. Settling the Question,The Middle East, March 1979
73.Regional Assessmnt of Human Settlements Policies in Arab Countries,Omer M.A. El Agraa
8 Adil Mustafa Ahmad, Symposium on National Human Settlements Policies, Sussex,
February 1978, organised by IIED, London
74.David R. Lee, Ekistics 227, 1974; Donatus de Silva, Uniterra, UNEP, Nairobi,
March 1977
75. Housing: survey on Kuvait, Financial Times, London, 26 February 1979
7b. World's First Integrated Solar Village in Algeria, UNU Newsletter, United Nations
UniversitB, Tokyo, September 1979
77.Problems of building industry, Daily News, Dar es Salaam, 26 January 1978; Report
of the National Seminar on Science and Technology for Development, organised
by the Tanzania National Scientific Research Council, Dar es Salaam, 1978
78.Rural Low-Cost Houses, Christer Svard, National Housing and Building Research
Unit (NHBRU), Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development, 1977; Building
Rules for One-Storey Houses on Surveyed Plots, NHBRU. April 1978; Economic Comparison
of Building Materials: Bar es Salaam, 0. Therkildsen 8 P. Moriarty, NHBRU, 1973;
bsteritic Soil-Cement as a Building Material, J.P. Moriarty 8 0. Therkildsen, NHBRU,1973
79. L. Magobeko, Africa Environment, Vol II, Nos 1-2, Dakar, 1976
80. Zambia upgrades its squatter settlements, The Times, London, 4 November 1977; The
Housing Project Unit: The Facts, Housing Project Unit, Lusaka; A Splatter Settlement in
Lusaka, zambia: George Compound, Richard Martin 8 Robert J. Ledogar, UN Centre for
Housing, Building and Planning, New York, 1977
El.Joseph Hanlon, New Scientist, 31 August 1978
82.Ghane: Preliminary Study, Shelter Sector, AID, Washington DC, 1978
BJ.Non-conventional Financing of Housing for Low-Income Households, United Nations,ST/ESA/83,
New York, 1978
84.mteritic soils for mtral Housing, A.A. Hammond, Building and Road Research
Institute, Kumasi. 1972
ES.Kwam$ Adjisam, African Business, March 1979
86. Issues of ~luann Settlements: The mveloping Countries, Austin Tetteh in Improving
Human Settlements: Up with People, ed. by H. Peter Oberlander, University of
British Columbia Press, Canada, 1976
87.Adenrele A. Aworona, Ekistics 261, 1977
88.David Aradeon, symposium on National Human Settlements Policies, IIED,
London, 1978
89.Akin L. Mabogunje, symposium on National Human Settlements Policies, IIED,
London, 1978
90,Kaizer Talib in Sun: Mankind’s Future Source of Energy, Vol 1, ed. by
Francis de Winter 8 Michael Cox, Pergamon, Oxford, 1978
91.K.A. Wahab, African Environment, Vol II, Nos 1-2, Dakar, 1976
92.0.D. Ouedraogo, African Environment. Vol II, Nos 1-2, Dakar, 1976
9i.Add for xiamtn Settlemnts in Latin Africa, J.E. Hardoy 8 Susana Schkolnik with
Ana M. Hardoy, IIED, London, 1978
94.A. Hyatt Verrill, Scientific American, August 1930
95.Juanita W. Porter, Scientific American, April 1924; John L. Von Blon,
Scientific American, 28 February 1920
96.#ud Eliulsions, Business Week, 12 December 1942
Yi.Robert C. Cook, Tile New Republic, 6 ‘+ytpqher 1947
98.Ranamd Earth, Architectural Forum, December 1946
99. Earth for homes, Ideas and Methods Exchange No 22, Dept of Housing and Urban
Development, Washington DC, 1955; Handbook for Building Homes of Earth, Dept of
Housing and Urban Development, Washington DC, undated
100. AII interview with Ralph Rivera, Adobe News, Issue 16,Los Lunas, New Mexico,
USA, 1977
101. Soft-Tech, ed. by J. Baldwin 8 Stweart Brand, Penguin, England, 1978
102. Pyehln,Norbert Schoenauer. Reporter Books, Montreal, 1973; Geoffrey Grigson,
The Listener, 21 August 1958
103. Charles Dunnett, Adobe NeuJs, Issue 16, Los Lunas, New Mexico, USA, 1977
104. Building in Cob, Pfse and Stabilised Barth,Clough Williams-Ellis a John and
Elizabeth Eastwick-Field, Country Life, London, 1919
105. A Review of the Ministry of Agriculture's Earth Houses, Working Paper 17, Erenda
Vale, Dept of Architecture, Lhliversity of Cambridge, 1973
106. Report of the Expert Group Meeting on Human Settlements Technology for
ECA and ECWA Regions, UNEP, Nairobi, 1976
107. Brickmskfng in developing countries, J.P.M. Parry, Building Research Establish-
ment, Watford UK, 1979 _
108. Sufldfn~ mterials Industry. UNIDO Monographs on Industrial Development, No 3,
Vienna, ,969
109.J.R. Coad, Building Research and Practice, March/April 1979
110. Built in Earth, ICOMOS, London, 1979
111. Gate 2, Journal for Technological Co-operation, ECHO aus Deutschland, Konig-
strasse 2, 7000 Stuttgart 1, West Germany
112. Thomas Land, Africa, London, July 1977
113. Construire en terre,P. Doat, A. Hays, H. Houben, S. Matuk 8 F. Vitoux,
Alternatives et Paralleles, Paris, 1979
114. Mobs Buildings - Cheaper and Faster,Twila de Vries, Agenda, AID, Washington DC,
December 1979
115. Stabflised soil, ed. by W.H. Cleghorn, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow,UK,
May 1979
116. P.J. Richards, International Labour Review, Geneva, Jan-Feb 1979
117. Rousing and Building Technology in Developing Countries, W.P. Strassman, MSU Inter-
national, East Lancing, UK, 1978
118. Shelter,ed. by Lloyd Kahn, Shelter Publications, Bolinas, California, 1973;
Shelter rr, ed. by Lloyd Kahn, Shelter Publications, Bolinas, California, 1978
119. Architecture without Archftects, Bernard Rudofsky, Academy Editions, London, 1964
 EARTHSCANBRIEFING DOCUMENTS
No 9 Primary Health Care (1978) English, Spanish

No 10 Drugs and the Third World (1978) English, French

No 11 What Use is Wildlife? (1978) English

No 14 Infoterra (1979) Englid2, French, Sp3nis.h

No 15 kill (1979) English

No 16 The International Wildlife Trade (1979) Spanish

No 17 A Voltan Village (1979) English, French

No 18 Life at the Margin: the need for Third World rural

development (1979) English

No 19 Whose Solar Power? (1979) English

No 20 k%ose Science? Whose Technology? (1979) English

No 21 Antarctica and its Resources (1979) Spanish

No 22 Water and Sanitation for All? (1980) English, Franch, Spanish

No 23 Water and Sanitation in Three Countries: Colombia, India

and Kenya (1980) English, French, Spanish
No 24 The Gulf: Pollution and Development (1980) English, Arabic

No 25 Carbon Dioxide, the Climate and Man (1981) English

No 26 Habitat - Five Years After (1981) English

Forthcoming titles include:

New and Renewable Energy Resources (two briefing documents)
Gasohol
Tropical Forests
All briefing documents can be obtained from: EARTHSCAN,10 Percy Street,
London MP ODR. UK.