Housing is a basic necessity that provides shelter, security, safety, and means for storage of other essentials; and is the setting for the communal life of the neighborhood. Housing is an object of attachment to the important idea of home. The right to housing is explicitly supported by international laws. The provision for housing is identified as one of the basic rights by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 25 as early as 1948. The number of urban poor around the world is increasing due to the rapid growth of urbanization. By 2020, slum dwellers are expected to reach almost 900million (UN-Habitat, 2012), and about 167 million housing units must be built or upgraded in the near future to accommodate the increasing number of urban poor population in developing countries.

A new housing approach is started named Self-help housing which is one of the major housing approaches implemented to solve slum problems in urban areas. The self-help approach is viewed as a means for helping the urban poor to build their houses in a cost-effective and responsive manner as it relies on incremental construction and self-help housing is often vulnerable to natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, landslides.