Sustainability in the post-disaster temporary housing management for urban areas

Resumen

Many people lose their homes every year due to natural disasters. One of the major challenges to mollify displaced persons is the provision of adequate post-disaster accommodations, temporary housing (TH) being the most common alternative. While the need for TH is dramatically increasing, this is criticized from a sustainability standpoint. Contrarily, a universal approach to temporary housing cannot successfully deal with this issue because each recovery has singular conditions. In this context, temporary housing units (THUs) have been used to serve as an alternative residence while the permanent housing process is being completed. This model has been widely used in previous recovery programs even though several drawbacks have been reported. Nonetheless, the lack of potential of certain areas persuades decision-makers to implement THUs. In view of this contradictory panorama, it is evident that decision-makers need to be supported in selecting adequate type of THUs to reduce the negative impacts of TH when there is no other possibility. To this end, this research presents a novel approach to determine sustainable solutions for TH in terms of economic, environmental and social requirements while integrating the stakeholders¿ preferences and the local conditions. This has been calibrated and validated with 5 study cases: (1) earthquakes in Turkey (1999), (2) Iran (2003), (3) Italy (2009), (4) and tsunami in Indonesia (2004), and (5) hurricane and flood in USA (2005). The proposed approach results in four new models: (1) a conceptual model oriented to assess the sustainability of post-disaster temporary housing alternatives; (2) a model to support decision-makers in discriminating the optimal site location of temporary housing; (3) a model to determine potential area subsets that meet certain area requirements to settle the THUs; and (4) a model for choosing optimized THUs. These models are directly based on the sustainability concept integrating the three main accepted pillars (economic, environmental and social). It should be emphasized that the MIVES method has been used throughout the research to deal with the sustainability assessment. This method permits minimizing the subjectivity in the decision-making process and relies on the value function concept. This new general approach is meant and designed to be a decisive support for decision-making in the field of TH management.