Transportation Library News

Containerized Living

Containerized shipping has been with us now for roughly half a century. Its history is well-documented in books such as Marc Levinsons's The Box: How The Shipping Container Made TheWorld Smaller and The World Economy Bigger (http://nucat.library.northwestern.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=4407690) and Arthur Donovan and Joseph Bonney's The Box That Changed The World (http://nucat.library.northwestern.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=4573722). It truly revolutionized shipping, enabling globalized trade on a scale that would otherwise have been impossible to sustain. Over time, though, individual containers fall out of use, due to factors such as wear or changes in standards. An inescapable side effect of containerized shipping, thus is the existence of large numbers of disused containers. We're now seeing a new revolution derived from these containers—housing.
There have been various initiatives using containers as housing for poor people in various parts of the world. See, for example, the October 4, 2008 story from the Voice of America News on their use in Ciudad Juarez (http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/archive/2008-10/2008-10-04-voa2.cfm). Moving beyond the simply utilitarian, the New York Times published an article titled "The Shipping Container as Building Block" (Sunday, February 1, 2009, Business Section, p.10, online at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/business/01newreal.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=shipping%20container%20as%20building%20block&st=cse#), discussing the results of a design competition challenging architects to develop "housing so cool that everybody would want to live in it." The first-place design is one that closely resembles the Habitat structure featured at Expo '67 in Montreal (http://www.habitat67.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_67). An earlier article, "Last Stop for Long-Haul Containers" (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D07EFD6153CF934A25754C0A9659C8B63&scp=2&sq=shipping%20container%20as%20building%20block&st=cse#
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/technology/17sun.html?scp=4&sq=shipping%20container%20as%20building%20block&st=cse) appeared in the Home and Garden section (Thursday, July 17, 2003).
As can be seen in this video, turning shipping containers into living space provides an elegant solution to the issue of what to do with retired containers which would otherwise litter the landscape for years to come:
Finally, we have clearinghouses for shipping container housing (http://www.shipping-container-housing.com/ and http://firmitas.org/), and Bob Vila on shipping containers: http://video.bobvila.com/m/21320565/converting-steel-shipping-containers-to-housing.htm.
Is there a shipping container in your future?