Community and Healing: Prefabricated, Place-Based, Trauma-Informed Disaster Relief Housing and Community Support

Human beings have always created shelters in order to live within the context of Earth’s natural processes. Of course, different places have yielded different solutions. Dictated by climate, physical conditions, natural resources, and hazards, people have both adapted to the environments in which they live and shaped them over time. Inevitably, the relationship between humans and the planet has shifted over time, as the effects of climate change increase with rising global temperatures, natural disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity (Fig. 1). Consequently, establishing precedents for increasingly effective temporary disaster relief housing is a crucial step toward supporting at-risk communities. Implementing clear and efficient procedures in areas around the world with a natural proclivity for geophysical, climatological, hydraulic, and meteorological disasters is paramount. Time-efficient, sustainably built, and cost-effective temporary housing and community support spaces that inherently promote the social-cultural values of at-risk areas will help mitigate the lasting detriment of disasters. This proposal advocates for a new precedent in designing disaster relief housing to address the pressing global issue of community displacement resulting from natural disasters.