Evaluation of the Sustainable Building Materials for Economic Housing in Egypt

Buildings are considered the national valuable assets need to preserve and maintain, because of their functional, civilizational or historical value. The buildings are suffering from design problems, such as architectural drawings and taking decisions that take many periods of time or implementation and maintenance by the implementation of the structure of buildings and finishes … etc. Sustainable housing development has been become an important issue that needs to be taken into subject to provide adequate housing for families, but methods of work are still inadequate for the needs of users. The importance of this subject is to find suitable solutions to provide adequate housing for low-income families through the availability of appropriate methods and materials that achieve the appropriate cost, quality and sustainability as well. In Egypt, people are suffering from providing suitable housing for the social and making the buildings environmentally friendly and administratively successful. Egypt is characterized by a continental climate with strategic locations distinct from any other location and has the most important natural resources that can be used but quickly can be used badly and the buildings are incompatible with nature and lack of respect for the site and this negatively affects the community. The problem is the failure to take advantage of local materials that help to reduce costs, time and the completion of the implementation period. The research aims to identify the housing projects in Egypt and the extent to the criteria of sustainability are met or not available. Consequently, the focus of this study is not only to look at these projects in problems but also to focus on developing future visions and how to implement sustainability elements, especially the idea of sustainable construction of the construction industry as well as on individuals and construction processes. This paper presents studying and analysis of economic housing projects in Egypt and the evaluation of the elements of sustainability achieved or vice versa, such as using of local building materials and how to apply them to achieve the sustainability of those projects and the requirements of users. The research finds that the lack of use and utilization of local materials leads to high costs of housing units and increasing problems, which need to be maintained periodically because of the inability of those materials of weather conditions.