The basic construction materials industry and today’s vast housing shortage

Abstract

This paper documents some of the aspects of the major challenge facing world-wide building: humanity's daunting shortage of basic housing, monographically focusing on what this means for the basic building materials industry. These needs have created the greatest demand ever for ex-novo solutions and an exponential increase in slum rehabilitation and improvement, translated here into the need for construction materials and more specifically, cement, as the emblematic component of buildings.

Keywords

• need for materials
• cement production
• “informal” sector
• impact of the cost of materials
• third world