Abstract:

The increasing emphasis on innovation, resilience and preparedness in humanitarian actions, leads to new approaches in post-disaster relief, including post-disaster shelter sector. Engineering and design of sustainable post-disaster emergency shelters play a vital role in optimizing the quality of post-disaster shelter aid in general.

UN report, Temporary Human Settlement Planning for Displaced Populations, (1998, Andrew Chalinder) emphasize the long-term effects of immediate shelter aid and the impact of emergency shelter. Fast decision-making on site depends on the personal judgment of the shelter experts and/or relief workers involved. This results in less optimal shelter solutions in terms of costs and quality. Integral design and engineering of sustainable post-disaster shelters can contribute to optimization of shelter aid by creating tailored solutions and more preparedness and less on site decision making.

In this article, we describe engineering and design approach that aims to contribute to the optimization of post-disaster shelter aid. In this approach, context sensitivity, crisis sensitivity and performance of the shelters are the criteria to realize a sustainable and integral post-disaster emergency shelter design.
The demands for shelters in a specific situation are connected with available and innovative, sustainable shelter solutions. We describe the steps needed to realize sustainable post-disaster emergency shelters, perform an experiment by designing an integral post-disaster shelter according to context sensitivity and crisis sensitivity principle and formulate the requirements for engineering and design of a sustainable post-disaster emergency shelter.

Keywords:

Engineering, design, post-disaster, shelter, sustainable.