| Summary: | During the twentieth century, technological development and the increase of mass production led to a progressive abandonment of traditional building techniques and ways of life, especially in urbanized regions pressured by rapid and unrestrained growth. From the seven billion people that today inhabit the planet, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme estimates that four billion live in informal houses, from which one billion of urban poor live in slums (UN-Habitat 2006). According to UN-Habitat, a slum is an urban area with a lack of basic services (sanitation, potable water, and electricity), substandard housing, overcrowding, unhealthy and hazardous locations, insecure tenure and social exclusion (UNHabitat 2003). In a short time period, several communities around the globe felt pressured to move from rural regions to urban areas located in the outskirts of cities. In these urban substandard areas, rapidly growing to become part of megacities, construction is developed using all sorts of materials and building possibilities, following neither standard regulations, nor the building-culture intelligence encompassed in vernacular construction. Meanwhile, the 3.1 billion people that live in rural areas (United Nations 2014), mostly have no access to Internet (ICT 2015), and a great number still lead traditional ways of life, with long-established customs and beliefs that have passed from one generation to another. In these communities, vernacular architecture expresses their adaptation to climatic and landscape contexts, the use of local natural materials, and the embodiment of their empirical knowledge regarding construction know-how (Correia 2009).
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