Abstract:
Today, one-third of the world’s urban population live in slums and shanties., while
prioritizing adequate housing as their basic need. They face a lack of basic needs such
as clean air, water, sanitation and healthy foods. Rapid urbanization leads to increased
demand for condominiums and focused on slum-free cities to get maximum utilization of
high potential prime lands. As a solution, shipping container housing (SCH) concept has
been successfully practiced in many countries in all over the world to promote low cost
housing (LCH) for resettlement projects. Therefore, this research intends to explore the
use of SCH concept as a LCH for permanent resettlement projects in urban areas of Sri
Lanka. A comprehensive literature synthesis emphasizes the suitability of SCH concept
as a LCH solution and it proved that approximately 60% of construction cost can be
saved by using this SCH concept over the traditional construction methods. Selected
case study for this research was “low income permanent resettlement programme in
Colombo city”. Finally, the study revealed that use of SCH concept as a LCH solution
for resettlement projects in Colombo will not be a feasible solution due to the specific
retarding factors from the low income groups, specific characteristics of shipping
container boxes and climatic conditions of Sri Lanka. Moreover, this study was very
useful for the governing authorities to identify the leading alter factors between the
theoretical concept and practical implementation of low income permanent resettlement
projects in Sri Lanka.
