There’s an emerging and innovative solution to the environmental, economic, and housing concerns we face around the globe: shipping container homes.

Few shipping containers come with nice large portholes – not cheap!

It turns out reusing the old containers is an inexpensive, efficient, and environmentally friendly way to build homes that can be used by low-income residents or as temporary housing following a natural disaster.

(Readers must make due allowance for the credulous gee-whiz writing, which flits lightly over numerous practical problems, as we’ll see.)

A decade ago, on vacation in Australia’s Northern territory, we visited Kakadu National Park, where in the midst of a torrential downpour we stayed in the relative luxury of what the guidebook called a ‘donger‘,

Aussie slang for a shipping container cut in half and converted into a single-room accommodation.

Donger in the making?  Just bifurcate and add people

The prefab metal box or can has a long history in makeshift housing, from the Quonset Hut (to the Airstream trailer, up through the increasingly immobile home, whose history I’ve previously told.

Spam in a can?  Newlywed WW2 couple with their Quonset hut

Some day, son, you’ll live in a full cylinder, not just half of one

The Quonset is the American successor to the British WW1 Nissen hut, which was invented (I have just discovered) by a Norwegian-American, Peter Norman Nissen:

The special thing about The Nissen Hut is unbuilt it can fit in the back of a 3-tone truck, making it the first pre-fab house ever. It is made out of corrugated iron with a metal frame; it also has a wooden door and a few oiled cloth widows, instead of glass.

Just follow the badly-photocopied instructions, and four hours later, a structure!

The Nissen Hut was also new and unique because is only took four hours for six men to assemble, the record time was 1 hour 27 min.

Quonsets are scattered about rural America, and because they are unbelievably durable (even if quite Spartan), they attract occupation and reuse:

Rose Cobis had been a squatter in this Quonset hut for years before she purchased it from the city of Kodiak and transformed it into the Quonset home it is today.

Back to the shipping container possibility:

Architects and humanitarians alike have jumped on the bandwagon to make everything from chic urban spaces and stylish homes to disaster relief and affordable housing.

Because they are made of such high-grade corrugated steel, shipping containers make a terrific structural material.  Perfectly orthogonal, they stack, inviting adaptive amalgamation:

Billed as the largest container city in the world, Amsterdam’s massive Keetwonen complex houses 1,000 students.

They are particularly well suited for constructing buildings, as they are stackable and their steel walls are durable, fireproof, and resistant to rust, mold, and termites. Shipping container homes can be constructed for far less cost than traditional building methods and use as much as 80 percent recycled materials.  The homes can also be prefabricated, a method or a system where the structure or its components are manufactured at a facility and transported to the building site.  This reduces the amount of time needed to complete a house, drives down costs, and uses indoor construction, which eliminates interruptions from inclement weather.

Throughout Africa and South Asia, containers are commonly reused for other purposes:

Container reused into bus stop, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa

Container converted into a phone center, Durban, South Africa

Empty containers accumulate [in importing countries] because it is too expensive and wasteful to ship them back to their countries of origin–the United States in particular has a large surplus of containers due to its trade deficit.

The problem thus isn’t using the shipping containers in Africa or South Asia, but getting them to Africa or South Asia.

Gotta get ‘em over the water

Better, I think, would be to enable dismantlement and reassembly, such as with hammered barrels. 

House made of hammered barrels, Cape Flats, Cape Town, South Africa

House made of hammered barrels, Athi River, Nairobi, kenya

Improvability is an intrinsic element of the desirable single-family home.

One organization utilizing this building technique is PFNC Global communities, which stands for “Por Fin Nuestra Casa,” the Spanish equivalent of “Finally, a Home of Our Own.” PFNC is in the process of launching their one-unit shipping container home business, and they plan to create housing for people currently living in dangerous or insufficient housing situations around the world. They can put together a unit for less than $10,000.

That’s too expensive for very poor people, as is this New Zealand gimmick, the porta-bach:

Need some flexibility with security? Need a temporary structure or small vacation home? Going off the grid? The Port-a-Bach system from New Zealand’s Atelier Workshop might be a good fit.

Costing around $55,000, Port-a-Bach sleeps two adults and two children comfortably, in a dwelling that folds up into a fully enclosed steel shell.

Nowhere near affordable, even if entertaining.

It comes with large internal storage cupboards and shelves; a stainless steel kitchen; bathroom with shower, sink and composting toilet; bunk beds and dressing room. Fabric screens allow you to shape internal space, as well as shelter the outdoor deck area.

Bach (pronounced Batch) is Kiwi slang for “Bachelor Pad,” and refers to the many small cabins that dot the famously picturesque country.

Nor is this concept house financially feasible:

The Redondo beach house: 1

Some architectural innovators have also used the containers to create sleek, modern, and architecturally stunning homes, apartments, and office buildings. California architect Peter DeMaria built the first two-story shipping container home in the United States in 2006 using recycled steel containers and a combination of conventional stick frame construction and prefabricated assemblies.

The Redondo beach house: 2

The result was a Redondo, CA Beach Home that won the 2007 American Institute of Architects Award for Design Excellence/Special Innovation.

The Redondo beach house: 3

The design resembles the geometric focus, simplicity, and openness of Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Redondo beach house: 4

Unfortunately for affordability, to convert the small, rigid, and dark containers into housing required so much adaptive reuse that the containers are little more than cumbersome wall panels.

Still, with all these metal boxes, somebody ought to be able to do something with them (and there are examples, such as Cargotecture):

The shipping container method is also ideal for creating portable temporary disaster relief shelters. Small units can be constructed quickly and then shipped out to provide people with a roof and basic amenities until they are back on their feet.

The temporary usually becomes the permanent, as our humble Quonset Huts show:

The Quonset hut of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church served as the center of Catholic life in Barrow until 1993. The church replaced the hut with a wood-framed structure.

With some adaptability, and possibly some easy-disassembly features, reusable shipping containers could represent the embryo house, giving people a nexus around which to establish a tenure and tenancy and gradually improve and personalize their homes.

Martie Rozkydal and her granddaughter, Julia Nesslage, beside the hut they painted together, 2003

Not surprisingly, the frontier for such housing in America is Alaska, where they are scattered about the wilderness, attracting home-makers just as dead Australian trees attract birds:

Rose Cobis had been a squatter in this Quonset hut for years before she purchased it from the city of Kodiak and transformed it into the Quonset home it is today.

Be it ever so humble, if it’s ours, we’ll improve it:

Cohoe Studio storage shed painted by artist and proprietor Lee Culhane, 2003, Cohoe, Alaska

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Yesterday’s post introduced the embryo house:

Although we Americans are used to the modern evolving American home, large parts of the world’s population live in self-built or physically informal housing, harnessing slumdwellers’ greatest resource – their own labor and ingenuity – to improve their homes. 

Self-built embryo house, Cape Flats, Cape Town, South Africa

That instinctual desire to improve the physical living conditions can be jump-started if people are provided with a physically formal embryo house, as a Harvard Magazine story demonstrated has been taking place in Chile, using the Chilean $10,000 household homeownership subsidy as its principal gap-filling resource.  They started by creating a home large enough to be worth improving:

Working within the limited subsidy ceiling, the Elemental architects constructed much larger homes than would normally be possible with $10,000, but left the interiors unfinished.

They also wangled a cheap price for the land:

Miriam Huerta, another resident, waits for a bus across the street from her home. Working in conjunction with residents, Elemental negotiated with the owner of the land on which the campamento sat, and ultimately purchased the land to give to residents, along with their houses, so they wouldn’t have to move. The development’s density made it possible to house everyone in this convenient location, a quick bus ride from the city center. It was important to the project’s designers that residents not be made to move far away, uprooting their lives and forcing them to enroll their children in different schools and find new transportation routes to work—or change jobs entirely.

Given land, secure tenure, and a sound structure, residents improve their lot:

The units also had no-frills front yards in their original condition; the Huertas embellished their windows and added a fence, a bench and an ornamental awning.

Ownership of solidly built property also enables people who have skills to put those skills to work in their idle time, in effect hiring themselves at their market rate:

Miriam’s husband is a builder, so the Huertas have acted more rapidly to embellish the home where they live with their three children—so much so that it is almost impossible to see the home’s bones.

Over time, the improvements are dramatic:

They filled in the backyard to make a separate room for the kitchen; an arched doorway sets it off from the living room. They replaced the plywood stairs with a spiral staircase of polished wood and wrought iron. In their bathroom, they tiled the floor blue and replaced the standard-issue sink with an edgier model: a clear glass bowl resting atop a freestanding drainpipe. The walls have been plastered over and painted warm hues; the bedrooms are carpeted.

The Huertas’ bathroom displays color-coordinated finishings: They replaced the toilet and sink and tiled the walls, floor, and bathtub.

Thinking like financiers, the Elemental architects targeted their expenditures toward the core components necessary to create the embryo house, so they focused on the structural elements that would impel the resident homeowner to improve the house. 

The residents moved into houses with bare concrete floors and plasterboard walls; Elemental provides the skeleton, and leaves the rest to residents.

For an embryo house to have the essentials of growth, it needs the following:

What should be in our skeletal house?

The house itself

Land, a plot big enough to accommodate an expanded multi-room house.

Footprint, a building configuration fitting on the site.

Framing.  Structural walls, beams, and trusses that will hold the load of floors, furniture, and people.

Wiring, because modern homes require electrical power.

Plumbing, to get water in and effluent out.

The municipal ecosystem

Legal title to the land.

Trunk infrastructure, including utility hookups.

This package of essentials comes courtesy of the formal developer:

Elemental builds the townhouses three stories tall, but fills in only the second floor and the staircase to get there. Residents must complete their own homes’ third floors; the firm holds workshops on building structurally sound staircases, floors, and ceilings.

(Renca is an exception; Elemental completed these units’ third floors because additional funding became available.)

Aravena is fond of saying each unit has “the DNA of a middle-class home.”

Not so much the DNA as the bones and nervous system.

Rosa Estrella Ortega Roa has big plans for the unit where she lives with her two-year-old grandson. Although the walls and ceiling of her kitchen are still unfinished…

…she has fenced in her front yard and filled it with plants, which she sells as her livelihood. And Ortega says this home, though unfinished, is a big improvement over her former makeshift home in the shantytown.

Rosa Estrella Ortega Roa, for one, has big plans for her unit, where she lives with her two-year-old grandson.

Plans do not always come to fruition, but plans are psychic potential energy.  Plans matter.  Plans inspire.

Already, she has stained the living room’s exposed red brick wall a warmer color; she has fenced in her front yard and added a variety of lush plants.

(Ortega sells plants, and also gas fireplaces, for a living; an upstairs bedroom holds stacks of the fireplaces in boxes.)

Ortega moved in only a few months ago, and most of the walls are still bare concrete. Even so, she says, this is a big improvement over the campamento, where she had lived all of her 58 years. There, her home had a muddy dirt floor.

Cleanliness is wired into primates; we want to be clean.  Dirt floors are impossible to keep clean.

Ortega (right) talks with Elemental project manager Gonzalo Arteaga in the bathroom of her home. Despite the unfinished walls, residents are pleased that the bathroom in each unit has a bathtub and a window that opens.

Windows that open are structural, part of the building’s configuration.  Windows are expensive.  Windows are status.

Elemental considers itself a “do tank,” as opposed to a think tank. Instead of discussing and arguing with critics, says Aravena, “we proved our point by building things.”

Good for them.  I have long believed that research and activity go hand in hand; as I say often, the solution is its own salesware.  Mission Entrepreneurial Entities are the change-makers.

Funded at first by Harvard, Católica, and the Chilean government, Elemental became a for-profit firm in 2005.

This MEE, like many an MEE before it, was founded by a mixture of eggheads, charities, and government. 

Massachusetts was founded by the eggheads who sailed on the Mayflower

Although government subsidies pay for land and materials, private companies, such as Copec, the Chilean oil firm, pay for the architects’ professional services as part of their corporate social responsibility programs.

Another hidden subsidy – corporate social responsibility.  Whether CSR is in companies’ interest is an entirely different subject.  What matters here is that this is definitely a subsidy to the project, and an important one.

“We think cities are a shortcut to equality,” explains Aravena. “Without having to wait for income redistribution, we can upgrade quality of life through infrastructure, public spaces, transportation, and, of course, housing.”

He’s right.  Cities are where wealth is created, and housing is the catalyst. 

Across town in Lo Espejo—the Santiago metro area’s poorest, and most densely populated, district—Elemental designed a pilot project of 30 units, the first phase of a development that will ultimately house 350 families from a former shantytown. Here, the residents chose a three-floor duplex configuration; one family lives on the top two floors, and another family below, in a larger first-floor unit. (The lower unit’s bedrooms are in the rear portion that stretches out from behind the upper two floors, making neighborly harmony more likely.) Units are in various stages of construction, with building materials piled up in some front yards, as owners add finishing touches.

The site of the second phase of the Elemental development in Lo Espejo, where a shantytown once stood. Even from Santiago’s most impoverished neighborhoods, the majestic Andes are visible in the distance.

By showing that it can be done, whatever it is, you create the pilot property that motivates others to trust you to do it again.  The doubters temporarily suspend their doubts.

Joanna Vera’s duplex; the woman pictured is her downstairs neighbor.

Indeed, they find courage:

Vera was one of the residents who believed strongly in what Elemental wanted to do; as the project developed, so did her own political voice. She personally negotiated the price with the landowner; during construction, she visited the site every day to monitor progress.

After she met the president at the dedication, Bachelet asked her to serve on the committee for Santiago’s bicentennial celebration, which will take place in 2010. Vera says most other committee members are far wealthier than she. “I represent Chilean poverty,” she said with pride.

At the dedication ceremony for the Renca development in May, Castro gave a speech. For the first time in her life, she said, she felt proud to be Chilean.

Cecilia Castro (right) talks with Gonzalo Arteaga and another resident of the Renca project.

One of Elemental’s goals for the project was that the units increase rather than decrease in value over time. They didn’t have to wait long to measure their success: the very day they were allowed to move in, some residents received offers of $20,000—double the amount of the subsidy that had built them.

But, says Arteaga, nobody accepted.

Give people hope, and a path to improvement, and they change the world.

Mukuru Sinai slumdweller savings cooperative, Nairobi, Kenya

A client of Slum Dwellers International member Pamoja Trust.

We’re working with them on the purchase of development land adjacent to their slum.

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The American vision of a new house: something constructed and occupied only when complete

That modern evolving American home is a new creature that first made its US appearance in the mid-nineteenth century and really blossomed in the last half-century with the American post-WW2 subdivision. Before that, housing was something self-built or self-improved, starting with the frontier log cabin or even more primitive sod house.

Sod house, 1901, San Diego

For much of the world today, however, the contractor-built house is a distant dream, as they live in spontaneous communities of self-built housing whose informality extends not just to their legal condition but also their physical construction, as illustrated in this story from Harvard Magazine:

Chile is a country that venerates architects, commonly listing their names on buildings’ cornerstones; yet, outside Santiago’s well-to-do areas, evidence of thoughtful design is all too scarce. Exiting the city center, skyscrapers’ shiny glass walls quickly give way to walls around houses, tall enough to obscure fully the homes they protect. Each block is a patchwork of materials: brick next to wrought iron next to opaque plastic. People on horseback share the road with cars.

How can we break the self-reinforcing feedback loop among physical, legal, and financial informality? Perhaps by providing people with a formally built embryo house – the smallest formalizable housing unit. Here’s my working definition:

I first heard the term embryo house at the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2005 Bellagio housing conference, where my colleague and since friend Alberto Mulas of Mexico articulated it. My earliest observation of embryo housing was in 2001, South Africa.

Embryo house, Franschhoek, Western Cape, South Africa

Key to the embryo house is structural integrity at inception; otherwise improvability is impossible, and improvability is the fuel that fires the homeowners’ imaginations:

Behind this rather ordinary scene is an extraordinary story with deep Harvard ties. In this tidy development of row houses, 170 families who once lived illegally have become homeowners.

Because you are what you live in, urbanization requires formality:

If I’m right, as I will explain in Part 2 of this blog, this is a huge deal for urban policy in the expanding megalopolises of the global south. But let’s put out the theory and explain why I think it’s right – starting, as one should always start, with definitions.

Urbanization is what we think of as bringing housing and homes up to a basic standard. That’s how the folks in Brazil used the term, and I came to like it.

Formality means the governmental and administrative systems recognize the structure, so the electrons and pieces of paper match what one finds when one goes to the neighborhood to look.

It’s not self-evident that the first term – a physical observable condition of tangible objects like bricks and pipes – must always be directly equivalent to the second term, which is an abstract condition of papers and reports. So allow me to take you through the seven steps, which for the impatient reader [Is there any other kind? – Ed.] I will summarize in the table below.

Formalization and improvability also contribute to a ‘broken windows’ effect cleanup:

Stay-at-home moms feel safe leaving their children in the front yard; some have started small businesses. It is a far cry from the lawless environment of the campamento, or squatter settlement, that sat on the same tract of land until 2004.

The development has transformed residents’ lives.

Change the tenure, change the incentives, and change the world.

It is also transforming notions of how to build housing for the poor. Similar developments are built or under way at a dozen other locations in Chile, and there are plans to replicate the project in other countries.

In these housing developments, the architecture firm Elemental departs from common practice in several crucial ways. Their path-breaking work has won one international architecture award so far.

Sometimes the idea is its own salesware, particularly if it can propagate freely. For idea propagation, universities help:

The Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the Santiago office of Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) helped conceptualize an international competition to design very low-cost housing for the poor in Santiago, and provided seed funding.

Elemental, formed around the goal of building a handful of housing developments, has taken on a life of its own and branched out far beyond this initial vision, but Chileans with Harvard connections remain influential. The firm’s principals include director Andrés Iacobelli, M.P.A. ’01, and executive director Alejandro Aravena, a professor of architecture at Pontifical Universidad Católica de Chile who was a visiting professor at the GSD from 2000 to 2005.

Alejandro Aravena in his office.

The red-and-white row houses are located in the Renca district, less than half an hour by car from downtown Santiago.

At the Renca development, the housing units are arranged in clusters around central courtyards, with 18 units opening onto each courtyard and an electrified metal gate at each end. Residents say this affords priceless safety and security. Visible in the foreground: a tree planted by residents, surrounded by rocks—also placed and painted by residents. Developers and residents alike say the high degree of input Elemental allowed the residents has made them take pride in the development, and motivated them to add their own improvements. They are building the park themselves, a symbol of pride in their new home.

Newly completed developments always have an abruptly-transplanted visual quality, but over time the landscaping matures and the residents personalize their neighborhood. Little by little, the informal is absorbed into the formal city.

The high housing density of Elemental’s projects allows for purchasing land close to the city center (one development fits 93 units onto 1.2 acres). .

As a result, residents don’t need to move to an outlying site an hour-long commute (or more) away from jobs.

In previous posts, we’ve seen the direct link between housing cost and commuting times.

They remain in the same neighborhood, with the same neighbors. They don’t have to change jobs, find a different bus route to work, or enroll their children in different schools.

Marta Herrera, pictured with Elemental project manager Gonzalo Arteaga, has set up a small convenience store in the front room of her house in the Lo Espejo development. Herrera, who lives here with her husband and two children, says she was unemployed before.

I’ve always thought this was key – neighborhoods are robust when people can move up and down the housing consumption ladder without changing the rhythms of their lives.

Herrera stands in the doorway of her home. “I prefer this,” she says. “My life is so happy now.”

Of course, subsidy helps:

The government gives a subsidy of $10,000 for each housing unit, an amount that must cover the cost of the land, building materials, and construction. (By way of comparison, the price for a middle-class house in Chile is about $60,000.)

In the case of the Renca site, the developers had their work cut out for them: the campamento bordered on a landfill, so there was polluted soil to scoop up and remove.

Slums are usually sited on poor-quality land.

That soil now sits at the development’s edge, where, in the form of a hill capped with a layer of clean soil, it will serve as a park. The residents have planted trees, erected brick barbecue pits, and installed stairs leading from the rows of townhouses up to the park. Their pride in the park shows in the details: at the base of each young tree is a circle of stones, painted a cheerful Smurf-blue. The residents have done all this at their own expense. “Every time we come here, we have surprises,” said Elemental project manager Gonzalo Arteaga on a visit in late October. “The energy is incredible.”

Homeownership changes behavior because improvability is a core benefit:

Improvability.  “A man’s home is his castle,” and that gives the homeowner the right to add battlements, additions, turrets, or some just about other improvement, garish or tasteful, wise or foolish, that comports with the zoning.  Just as tattooing or other bodily modifications are assertions of selfhood, so too is the right to paint one’s home a truly hideous color a testament of individuality: my house, my paint job.

Not built from standard plans!

US counterexamples abound, some many indeed that we are coming to accept intrusions into improvability as part of urban living.  Historic districts or conservation districts represent the taste police.  Homeowners’ association handbooks or condo bylaws spell out in detail what can and cannot be done.  Co-ops may have the Officious Committee.  And mobile home owners, living as they do inside a fixed and sealed envelope, have the least improvability of all. 

Housing is the catalyst of improving the urban environment.  Formality and informality live side by side:

Through the wrought-iron bars of a fence bordering the development, a shantytown is visible. Ramshackle structures lean on one another; they have roofs and walls of corrugated metal, or just canvas. It is a stark contrast to the neat, square corners of the Elemental units. This is part of the old campamento, explains Ana Lamilla, who lived here for 25 years before moving into one of the new homes.

Ana Lamilla surveys the Renca development from the still-under-construction park on a ridge above. Behind her, part of the squatter settlement where she once lived remains.

Some of the residents doubted that the new development would succeed and chose not to participate. They stayed in their homes and watched as most of the plot was cleared and orderly rows of townhouses rose from the ground. “They had to see it to believe it,” she says.

The Observant Herd meets doubting Thomas – don’t move until they prove they can do it.

(These families have now agreed to vacate their old homes and move into Elemental houses; the firm is constructing additional units in a second phase.)

The embryo house clearly improves people’s behavior, and motivates further investment.  How is it created?

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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