Flatpack Emergency Homes: A Sustainable Future for Temporary Housing

The frequency and intensity of natural disasters is increasing, and so is our need for fast and quality temporary accommodation. Despite the high demand, temporary accommodation is widely criticised for being unsustainable, resource-consuming, and culturally inappropriate. Current temporary housing solutions follow a linear economy format of take-make-use-dispose, which leads to unsustainable outcomes. The rapidly designed and mass-produced nature of these houses also makes them unsuitable for the climate and people. There is a lack of design information and testing in the literature about creating sustainable temporary accommodation through a circular economy approach of use-repair-recover. This thesis argues that using the circular economy principles will lead to a more sustainable and successful temporary accommodation solution. It also argues that predesigning disaster temporary accommodation will contribute to a successful outcome. By using existing prefabrication technology, the objective is to develop temporary homes that a community could assemble quickly in a disaster scenario. These homes will be flexible and designed to grow with their users over time. When the housing is no longer required, it can be easily disassembled and stored until needed or, upgraded to become permanent. Based on design iterations and critical reflections, it was found that temporary accommodation is suited to a circular approach instead of the current linear one, and it is beneficial to create these designs in a pre-disaster phase. This system of post-disaster accommodation will allow for a high level of sustainability and quality of life for displaced people. A Disaster Housing Recovery Framework was created so new circular economy post-disaster designs can be created for any scenario. It is hoped that the framework produced in this thesis can be used by architects and government agencies to pre-design culturally appropriate and sustainable temporary accommodation.