Decision-Making for Post-Disaster Housing Reconstruction in Critical Zones: A Systematic Review of Criteria, Strategies, and Research Gap

Post-disaster housing reconstruction (PDHR) is increasingly needed in critical zones—areas where persistent uncertainty, institutional instability, and structural operational constraints define the reconstruction environment—yet the knowledge base guiding such efforts has been built almost entirely on evidence from stable natural disaster settings. This study addresses this limitation through a systematic literature review conducted in accordance with PRISMA 2020 guidelines, synthesising peer-reviewed evidence from Web of Science and Scopus to map existing PDHR strategies, construction technologies, decision criteria, and evaluation approaches. The synthesis exposes three interlocking gaps: PDHR based on human-made disasters is markedly underrepresented in the literature (Gap 1); PDHR in critical zones—particularly active human-made critical zones—rarely feature as the primary object of analysis (Gap 2); and no holistic multi-criteria structured decision framework treats contextual factors such as supply chain feasibility, security conditions, and financial continuity as the primary evaluation criteria (Gap 3). Existing frameworks prioritise intrinsic performance measures suited to stable contexts and remain structurally misaligned with critical-zone realities, establishing the need for context-driven decision frameworks in which operational constraints become central to reconstruction choices.