Reusing Earthquake Rubble in a Temporary Housing Structure for Hot Arid Climates

Abstract

Natural disasters are responsible for causing significant damage to built environments and its consequent homelessness. This subject is notable in developing countries, specifically when they are located in earthquake-prone areas. After extensive destruction due to such incidents, authorities are confronted with numerous economic, social, and environmental complications in the implementation of housing solutions. Temporary housing (TH) is a short-term solution enabling communities to return to their routine activities by providing a minimum level of housing requirement. To accelerate the recovery procedure, resources should be carefully managed and a sustainable plan concerning economic, social, and environmental complexities should be developed. Therefore, this paper investigates the shortcomings of the existing TH solutions and uses prior experiences to propose a sustainable TH solution for an extensive area of Iran with a hot-arid climatic condition. Accordingly, the result is a TH system using earthquake rubbles in modular gabion containers. It was found that such a method could increase the occupants comfort level up to 8.61% while reducing a project’s carbon footprint compared with the existing solutions. The proposed system assists authorities in confronting disasters with a more sustainable TH plan.