This research focuses on transitional accommodation provided after a disaster, a key phase in the disaster recovery process. The increasing frequency of natural disasters in recent decades and the media coverage of these events have raised global interest for developing emergency and temporary solutions. However, most proposals have tended to develop universal prototypes centred on the short-term product and not on the long-term process. The lack of architectural and institutional memory leads to proposals emerging after every disaster that ignore the chance to learn from past experiences. This document begins by studying the impact of disasters in the past 50 years and the definitions of temporary accommodation, and then analyses historical experiences in temporary shelter during the past century. The research concludes with a comparison of different solutions developed in the past decade by universities, architects, designers, and engineers, manufacturers, NGOs, and governments.