Post-Disaster Temporary Settlement Navigation: A Comparative Study Using VR and Space Syntax

In recent years, natural disasters and armed conflicts have occurred with increasing frequency, severely disrupting everyday life. These events produce large numbers of displaced refugees, creating significant challenges for the planning and design of post-disaster temporary settlements. One crucial issue is how to use spatial layout to facilitate efficient movement and resource acquisition within these settlements. This study identifies four prototypical spatial configurations commonly found in temporary settlements—fishbone, organic growth, grid, and bagua—and constructs corresponding 3D virtual environments. To simulate the navigation behaviors of disaster victims seeking supplies and gathering within settlements, 36 university students were recruited to perform navigation tasks in VR across the four layouts. Their task completion time and walking trajectories were recorded.

Using space syntax analysis, we quantified the intelligibility of each layout and extracted three types of optimal paths between task nodes: the shortest metric path, the fewest-turns path, and the minimum-angle-change path. This study focuses on two core questions:
(1) Whether differences in spatial intelligibility across layouts significantly affect navigation efficiency (i.e., reaction time).
(2) How strongly each of the three optimal path types influences participants’ route choices.

Statistical results show that settlements with higher spatial intelligibility yield significantly shorter reaction times, while gender and prior spatial-training experience have no significant effect. Overlap analysis between participants’ actual trajectories and the three optimal path types revealed the following ranking (from highest to lowest similarity): shortest metric path, minimum-angle-change path, and fewest-turns path.

Through the combined use of space syntax and VR-based comparative experiments, this study reveals the mechanisms by which settlement layout shapes spatial navigation behavior in post-disaster contexts, providing valuable guidance for the future planning and design of temporary disaster relief settlements.