ABSTRACT
Housing the poor in the developing world is one of the major challenges facing mankind in the last decade of the twentieth century. The challenge is particularly acute in urban areas where populations are projected to grow from a total of less than 300 million in 1950 to almost two billion by the turn of the century; more than 50 million every year throughout the 1990s, an average growth rate of 3.4 per cent per annum. Within the developing world, the growth in urban population is most acute in the poorest countries.1
