“Temporary” Housing to Heal: A Missing Piece of Post-Disaster Community Psychosocial Resilience Building

Disaster survivors, facing many aspects of mental distress, sometimes are forced to stay in temporary housing for years. Their psychosocial needs have changed after the traumatic event, but existing temporary housing designs do not respond to their real needs, nor acknowledge the capacity within the community as a whole. This thesis aims to answer the question of how post-disaster temporary housing contributes to psychosocial aspects of community resilience building. Based on the literature review of existing studies on post-disaster temporary housing, discussions on key factors of community psychosocial resilience and the psychosocial impact of temporary housing were conducted in this thesis. These discussions were followed by a comparative case study on the implementation and follow-up actions of two post-disaster temporary housing projects in China and Japan. The analysis of these two topics and the case study reveal gaps between humanitarians and architects, when they work together to develop temporary housing, as well as aspects that can be improved for temporary housing to better meet the needs of its inhabitants and empower them for improved recovery. The results indicate that temporary housing has a psychosocial impact on its inhabitants. By designing the built environment of temporary housing that strengthens shared community identity and promotes mutual help from community members, community resilience can be better fostered. Achieving this will require better coordination between humanitarians and architects, as well as the involvement of other interdisciplinary professionals.