Nearly one-quarter of the world's urban population lives in informal settlements or encampments, most in developing countries but increasingly also in the most affluent countries. Many residents live in overcrowded, insecure dwellings, without water and sanitation, fearful of eviction and subject to preventable life-threatening illnesses. UN Sustainable Development Goal 11: ‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ is committed to ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and upgrade slums by 2030. There is therefore an urgent need for more affordable and permanent housing to be developed. This paper presents a review of the construction and energy aspects of affordable housing developments for informal settlement dwellers. The conditions of existing informal settlements in Global South countries have been researched and various case studies of informal settlement upgrading programmes are presented. The potentials of solar energy technologies in development of green affordable houses in case study countries Uganda and Indonesia are assessed.

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for conventional strength steels. For HSS, EN 1993-1-12 currently states that the rules in EN 1993-1-2 are applicable to high strength steels up to S700.The production of HSS is different from that of other steel types in two main aspects, the steel chemical composition and the heat treatment process that are adopted to achieve their high strengths. There are four main processing routes for the production of high strength steel plates, namely: Thermo-Mechanical (TM) rolling, Thermo-Mechanical rolling with Accelerated Cooling (TM-ACC), Thermo-Mechanical rolling with Direct Quenching (TM-DQ) and Conventional route for QT plates [4]. The different chemical composition and heat treatment processes employed in the production of the HSS by these routes lead to material stress-strain behaviours that are different from those of conventional mild steels at both room and elevated temperatures. At room temperature, the ductility and the ratio of the ultimate-to-yield strength of HSS reduce with increasing strength. At elevated temperatures, high strength steels, like all steels, lose strength and stiffness with increasing temperatures, but the rate of degradation is influenced by the chemical composition and the heat treatment process. The microstructure of mild steel can be either pearlite, bainite, or combination of both depending on the rate of cooling of austenite steel [5]. Bainite and pearlite transformations are stable phases, and do not transform to other phases without reheating to form austenite (at about 900°C). On the other hand, the microstructure of