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Identifying and Classifying the Design Components of Post-Disaster Temporary Housing: A Systematic Review and Directed Qualitative Content Analysis
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Abstract: (2 Views) |
Objective: This study begins from the problem that post-disaster temporary (transitional) housing design in Iran lacks a comprehensive, integrated framework of design components agreed across agencies, despite the National Recovery and Rehabilitation Program, agency-level instructions and accumulated field experience. That absence has produced three observable consequences: physical reductionism in decision-making, disconnection between the scales at which design decisions are taken, and an inability to evaluate operations and learn from them. The National Recovery and Rehabilitation Program assigns the drafting of design criteria for transitional settlements to the pre-disaster phase, and such criteria logically rest on a prior identification of the components themselves. The objective of this research is therefore to identify, extract, consolidate and systematically classify the components that shape temporary housing design, so that the output can serve as the conceptual and technical basis for national criteria, guidelines and executive instructions.
Method: The study is applied and qualitative, combining a systematic literature review, reported in line with PRISMA 2020, with directed qualitative content analysis. The conceptual framework is three-dimensional: conceptual categories of components; three design scales, namely unit, site, and governance and infrastructure system; and three life-cycle stages, namely pre-disaster, occupancy, and closure. The framework is semi-open, in that main categories were set in advance while sub-categories and components were derived inductively from the data. A central methodological decision was to distinguish a component, understood as a subject of a design decision and qualitative in nature, from a criterion, an indicator and a binding standard; the output of the study sits at the component level. Searches covered international citation databases, Iranian scientific databases, the repositories of international humanitarian organisations, national legal repositories, and backward and forward citation chaining. Screening proceeded in four steps: 486 records were identified, 94 duplicates removed, 175 excluded at title and abstract screening, 83 excluded at full-text assessment, and 38 excluded for lacking explicit or inferable design-level content, leaving a final corpus of 96 sources comprising 18 international standards and guidelines, 27 international peer-reviewed articles, 14 national documents and laws, 12 research and technical reports, 13 Iranian scientific sources and 12 evaluation reports of past operations. Open, axial and selective coding were applied; inter-coder agreement rose from 78 to 91 percent after reconciliation. Validity was supported by source triangulation and a structured review by three experts, and five consolidation rules were applied.
Results: Open coding produced 612 initial codes, reduced to 341 codes, then to 158 intermediate categories, and finally to 127 components, an overall reduction of about 79 percent. The components were organised into a three-layer system of 5 categories and 19 sub-categories: physical-technical with 46 components, environmental with 17, socio-cultural with 24, economic with 14, and managerial-institutional with 26. Comparison of reference values across authoritative standards showed convergence for total site area per person and minimum spacing between units, but marked divergence for water supply per person and sanitation ratios, which supports the decision to work at the component rather than the standard level. About 64 percent of the components lie outside the physical-technical category, and the most frequently cited component in the corpus, proximity of the site to households’ former place of residence with 71 citations, is socio-spatial rather than technical. The scale matrix showed a balanced distribution across the three levels, with socio-cultural components spread almost evenly. The life-cycle matrix showed that 91 components, or 72 percent, carry pre-disaster implications, while only 32 relate to closure. Using an explicit scoring rubric, forty-five components were assigned to the very-high design priority level, including nine in the managerial-institutional and seven in the socio-cultural category. Iranian sources contributed only 8 percent of the environmental codes. A coverage-adequacy test on three real cases showed that 94 percent of the reported problems could be formulated in terms of a component in the list.
Conclusions: Temporary housing design is a multi-dimensional problem, and any approach that reduces it to the technical specification of a unit overlooks most of that problem. A substantial share of the final quality is shaped before the disaster, which makes investment in preparedness, in the form of pre-selected sites, standard designs, framework agreements with suppliers and an integrated information system, a key policy implication of this study. The knowledge of this field is not transferable at the level of numerical standards but is transferable at the level of components, which makes component identification the necessary link between the international literature and national criteria. Among the national documents reviewed, no approved cross-agency instruction or procedure for governance and coordination was identified, although 48 of the 127 components sit at the system level and the managerial-institutional category is the second largest. Environmental and economic dimensions are the least covered fields in the Persian-language literature and are therefore priorities for future research. The resulting system supports four practical applications: a framework for drafting national criteria, a checklist for reviewing site plans before implementation, a post-occupancy performance evaluation tool, and a basis for provincial preparedness action plans.
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| Keywords: design components, disaster recovery, post-disaster housing, systematic review, temporary housing, transitional shelter. |
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Type of Study: Research |
Subject:
Special
Received: 2026/10/3 | Accepted: 2026/10/3 | Published: 2026/10/3
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