Drivers that help adopting stabilised earth construction to address urban low-cost housing crisis: an understanding by construction professionals Mohammad Sharif Zami Received: 24 June 2010 / Accepted: 21 March 2011 / Published online: 9 April 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Abstract Addressing urban housing crisis is an enormous challenge for most of the countries due to the increasing cost of the building material. Therefore, affordable alter- native building material can make a breakthrough to the urban housing crisis. In the light of current success of stabilised earth construction in urban low-cost housing, it is important to find out the potential drivers that can help to adopt this building material. This paper aims to identify and highlight these drivers from the method of literature review and validates through a Delphi technique. Keywords Construction Á Drivers Á Earth Á Housing Á Professionals Á Stabilised Á Urban 1 Introduction Compressed stabilised earth blocks are becoming popular in various parts of the world with the introduction of sustainable construction concepts (Jayashinghe 2007). Although most of the developed countries do have well-structured and effective programmes to address the environmental sustainability through the use of energy efficient appropriate construc- tion materials, stabilised earth is not widely used. More surprisingly, most of the con- struction professionals from developed and developing countries do not even know about the contemporary stabilised earth construction (Zami and Lee 2010a, 2010b). The unawareness about this building material amongst the construction professionals makes us aware that, there are inhibitors which make contemporary stabilised earth construction unpopular. But, it is evident from the literature review that experimental stabilised earth construction projects are a success in many developing (India, Sudan, South America, Southern and Northern Africa) and developed (Australia, Germany, Austria and France) Readers should send their comments on this paper to BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue. M. S. Zami (&) Department of Architecture, College of Environmental Design, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), P. O. Box: 1802, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia e-mail: mdszami@kfupm.edu.sa 123 Environ Dev Sustain (2011) 13:993–1006 DOI 10.1007/s10668-011-9301-0