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Housing may be the Third World’s most intractable problem.In most of the cities of Africa, Asia and Latin America, at least a quarter of the population has to live in ramshackle, makeshift shelters in slums and shanty-towns. In some cities, 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 all 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.