Hi Simon,

I suggest that you have a look at the BREEAM, LEED, Green Globes etc - they might not discuss low cost urban housing per se, but they will give you a good outline of factors which govern material selection, and how these interact with other sustainability indicators. Also I think using a building lifecycle based approach (ideally cradle to cradle) is very helpful to see rather obscure implications of material selection that are often overlooked, such as energy footprint associated with the operation of a building under a given local climate regime, and recyclability/reusability. 

Hope this helps.

You have to ensure you get correct context of low cost as applied in that country because experience and data in many developing countries in Africa will show that the definition of low cost by government and what is in practice are quite different. I suggest you look up some literature on Housing in Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa. You !at also want to include availability and workability as part of variables to be measured. Kindly separate low cost housing by government, private developers and then individuals.

In my research, I used the life-cycle time cost to create, maintain, and eventually decommission, converted to units of time per person per day.  The renewable resources that are used that come from outside what the community can maintain in perpetuity incur a future time cost equal to the slope of the resource-use/time-use-to-meet-needs curve at capacity x the amount of over consumption.  The non-renewable resources that are used that will become exhausted over the duration of the lifecycle of the project limit the effective lifespan of the project, weighted for the quantity of resources used.

This method should be universal.

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Thanks for all your comments. My research has been refined to assess the materials against Green Economy objectives. (The task then is to determine PI's for this).

Please see the recent question I have posed on this.

In my recent publication, I talk about how the community would establish it's priorities, by identifying the boundary of needs that they want to focus on, and the symptoms of the unmet needs within the community. There would then be some math that would plot out what are the means to increase the quality of life of the community. You would then determine the combination of technologies that would produce the maximal increase in quality of life at a minimum cost. Not quite what you're asking, but you will be getting an optimal solution, rather than just a better one.