Aligning needs and sustainability: A case study of bio-based temporary housing

As a result of repeated natural disasters in the last decade, Australia has an acute need for innovative and scalable models for provision of temporary housing. Common criticisms of currently available housing systems revolve around their high production costs and a heavy reliance on imported building solutions. To address these limitations, a model for temporary post-disaster housing has been developed to utilise locally available and renewable timber resources, to enable faster, cheaper, low-carbon, and scalable temporary housing delivery options for Australian disaster recovery. This paper presents the first temporary house prototype constructed using a novel hybrid timber-cardboard sandwich (TCS) composite, developed as the result of a significant collaborative effort between academic, government, industry, and community partners. A full-scale 11 m ² prototype was built to benchmark the affordability, sustainability, design flexibility, fabrication complexity, embodied carbon, and durability of the TCS House system. The prototype was also used to explore strategies to maximise use of renewable and recycled materials in temporary housing construction, by providing direct links between the forestry and wood products sector and local community end users.