Temporary housing after disasters: A state of the art survey

The number of natural disasters has drastically increased, causing great damages on buildings. Large amount of houses have suffered damages and become unusable, causing a high number of homeless people. Housing reconstruction programmes play a decisive role on the disaster recovery and providing temporary housing is a crucial step of these programmes. During the reconstruction of permanent housing, it allows victims to have a private and secure place to return to their normal life. It has been widely used after the largest scale disasters but it has also been greatly criticized, mainly for being unsustainable and culturally inadequate. The study aims to present a state-of-the-art survey on the topic, as well as to identify the main problems, their origin and the existing proposals to avoid them. The research also proposes some guidelines that can reduce the effects of those problems. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.