Temporary housing plays a critical role in disaster response and recovery by providing a temporary home for displaced people before they return to their permanent residence. In recent years, temporary housing has faced three primary dilemmas related to design type, site selection, and cost. Significant contributions have been made in research and in practice to improve temporary housing management. However, gaps still exist in resolving the dilemmas, and a critical review and evaluation of current methods is needed to determine the path forward and identify priorities of future research. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of prior methods developed and applied towards temporary housing management and identifies future pathways for success in temporary housing research and implementation. The literature review reveals that temporary housing requires further research in proactive management, storage, sustainability, and community resilience to effectively enhance post-disaster temporary housing. This study finds that programs such as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and the Sheltering and Temporary Essential Power (STEP) program provide methodologies which can benefit temporary housing implementation, designs, and modeling. In addition, circular economy thinking can enable the recyclability of temporary housing to reduce economic and environmental impacts.

Vulnerability assessment plays a critical role in disaster management and requires the consideration of multiple dimensions that involve both the built and social environments. A common approach to address this problem is the use of composite indicators, which offer a simplified method to combine information across different dimensions and facilitate decision making. However, composite indicators present limitations in the context of hazard vulnerability. This study investigates the source of these limitations and provides ways to overcome shortcomings in the interpretation of composite vulnerability indicators. To conduct this investigation, a composite indicator is developed to assess the vulnerability of power and transportation infrastructure, while considering social vulnerability, to capture community hazard vulnerability. Using a case study of Harris County in Texas, we investigate the disparities in outcomes resulting from different calculation methods, such as sub-indicator weighting. The case study shows that the value of the indicator is not consistent across different calculation methods. Additionally, weighting the sub-indicators plays an important role in the value of the indicator. Combining infrastructure and social factors is found to be misleading in the interpretation of hazard vulnerability, and the use of bivariate maps is proposed to better distinguish between infrastructure and social vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability are three concepts commonly used in assessing the quality of a variety of systems. While each can be applied independently when performing risk analysis, there is growing interest across multiple disciplines in understanding how these concepts can be integrated when considering complex adaptive systems, such as communities. In this paper, we identify issues related to the use of these respective concepts in assessing complex adaptive systems, and describe how these issues may produce imbalanced results and maladaptive outcomes. We identify five critical areas where alignment and integration across concepts can lead to improved system assessment. As a result, we introduce a new paradigm, sustainable resilience, in which these concepts are integrated to enable alignment of adaptation and transformation strategies with desired resilience outcomes. This work provides the foundation for the development of an integrated assessment framework to help guide informed risk-based decisionmaking for sustainable and resilient systems.