How can a simple steel box of 20 by 8 by 8 feet in size transform cities all over the world and change the way people live, work and consume? The modern shipping container (containerization), originating in the mid-20th century, has not only been a driving force in the development of international trade but also in urban progress and decline. When it comes to the world economy’s widespread adoption of the shipping container in terms of mutation, one might wonder whether it is an outcome of capitalism or simply human nature. In any case – the box itself has undergone a mutation, too. Like organisms that adapt and mutate in order to survive mass extinction, new technology, such as the IoT-enabled smart container, has come to the fore to once again change patterns of human behaviour.

Few people have much reason to pass through Amsterdam’s Westhaven district. Too far out of town and too industrial, it doesn’t hold a candle to the city’s captivating Grachtengordel, with its famous old canals and all the pretty architecture from the so-called Dutch Golden Age. But if you want to get the whole truth about Amsterdam, or any city for that matter, you have to go to places like Westhaven. Among other things, it’s here that you’ll find the OBA Bulk Terminal, which contains several great mounds of coal, along with other piles of agricultural products, minerals and biomass. The containerization is real.

“An image of urban progress which almost completely denies the underlying environmental and human costs”

This is the dirty stuff that keeps the Dutch economy ticking over. Everyone thinks modern cities like Amsterdam long ago dispensed with the need for this kind of economic activity, but not all this stuff could be shipped off to China. Some of it had to remain close by, even if it was pushed to the margins. The invisibility of such areas is essential to our image of the modern city. Ordered, hightech, and most of all, clean, this image would be impossible without the intermodal shipping container (containerization), a form of cargo container that allows goods to be transferred from one mode of transport to another without the costly process of unpacking and repacking. With this one simple innovation in the management of goods, we were finally able to close our eyes to the wildly complex material processes that are required to reproduce the city, and in the process create an image of urban progress which almost completely denies the underlying environmental and human costs.

The modern shipping container has its origins in 1955, when trucking magnate Malcom McLean teamed up with engineer Keith Tantlinger to hammer out the container’s essential design, which remains practically the same to this day: 8 feet wide, 8 feet tall, 20 feet long, with 20 mm-thick corrugated steel walls that can, amazingly, hold a weight of 25,000 kg. The design’s persistence, ubiquity and overall success was not only due to its simplicity, however, it was also thanks to McLean encouraging Tantlinger to give away the patents to the industry for free, so that the same standard could be replicated on trucks, ships, cranes and ports across the world.

“Port-side areas turned into ghost towns” – containerization

The shipping container quickly and drastically cut the number of dock workers needed to handle goods at ports. In Britain, for instance, the number of people employed in the port industry declined by 72 per cent between 1961 and 2001, while the number of people employed as dock workers declined by 90 per cent. With no need to have so many people present on the docks, what followed was the mass abandonment of inner-city ports, with large swathes of warehouses left empty (and ripe for redevelopment). At the same time, with no need to have a large pool of labour on-hand in nearby neighbourhoods, the port-side areas of these cities turned into ghost towns.

We see the first effects of this in the port cities along America’s East Coast: Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Baltimore. But the effects also spread to other historic port cities elsewhere in the world like London and Amsterdam, where the warehouses along the Oostelijk Havengebied (Eastern Docklands) were first squatted and then, in many cases, turned into cultural venues like Pakhuis de Zwijger. In London, after hundreds of years as the beating heart of international trade, the Docklands closed completely, leaving eight square miles of derelict land which was quickly redeveloped and given a big boost by the creation of the Canary Wharf financial district.

“The shipping container took the city’s dirt elsewhere”

It was not just port cities that were affected, either. In America, cities like Detroit went from being the centre of the world’s car industry to a hollow shell in a matter of decades. The reason for this: not only did the shipping container make dock work redundant, it also made it possible to displace manufacturing work to other parts of the world where labour costs were lower and workers less unionised. Eventually, many of these cities found a way to bounce back from the desolation, converting the abandoned warehouses or demolishing them and putting luxury condos in their place. They slowly managed to draw people back in with the promise of various sorts of service work, instead of the dirty work of processing and manufacturing goods that had fuelled their economic growth in the first place. In more ways than one, the shipping container took the city’s dirt elsewhere.

“One of the most important boats in the history of canals”

All this occurred because of one simple 8’ by 8’ by 20’ feet steel box. But why did this occur, and could it have happened sooner? Precursors to the intermodal cargo container have existed since at least the early Industrial Revolution. In 1766 James Brindley signed the “Starvationer”, a ship that could navigate the underground waterways of the Bridgewater Canal from the Duke of Bridgewater’s coal mine at Worsley to Manchester, and whose skeletal ribs inspired its peculiar name. The box boat had ten wooden containers that allowed coal to be transported by boat and then be transferred to horse-drawn carriage. Waterfront, the magazine of The Canal & River Trust describes it as “one of the most important boats in the history of canals”.

“Tetrapods that finally went on to conquer the land”

Much like McLean’s container, it helped usher in a new industrial age by cutting the cost of coal in half, almost overnight, thereby enabling the rapid expansion of industry in booming Manchester. But the Starvationer never captured the true potential of the intermodal container. Nor did the handful of other increasingly sophisticated examples that followed in its wake. These were the amphibians that ventured further outside the water but never left it altogether. McLean’s containers are the tetrapods that finally went on to conquer the land. But explaining all these transformations with the analogy of mutation is too easy.

Containerization “Tendency to describe socio-economic processes by way of nature metaphors”

There’s an intention to these changes which belies the nature metaphor. In his book Uneven Development, geographer Neil Smith explains that this tendency to describe socio-economic processes by way of nature metaphors has a very specific ideological function: to make these processes seem “normal, God-given, unchangeable”. By talking about the world economy’s widespread adoption of the shipping container in terms of mutation, “nature, not human history, is made responsible”, and as Smith says, “capitalism is treated not as historically contingent but as an inevitable and universal product of nature which, while it may be in full bloom today, can be found in ancient Rome or among bands of marauding monkeys where survival of the fittest is the rule. Capitalism is natural; to fight it is to fight human nature.”

Which is to say, this elegant metaphor for the sweeping and highly complex changes to our global economy obscures the human-made tragedy that followed as a result of, among many other things, destroying the industrial power of dock workers and factory workers in cities like Liverpool and Detroit, or allowing the decades-long emptying-out of cities like New York and Amsterdam, leading both places to buckle under the pressure of lost tax revenue for decades. All this was anything but natural. It depended on ideological choices that were made for very particular reasons. (…)

Read the entire article in topos 113 on urban mutations.