[A portion of the port of Tianjin — radically determined by the requirements, conventions, and techniques of international shipping; bing maps]

Writing for Current Intelligence, Serial Consign‘s Greg Smith (and guest co-writer Jordan Hale) discuss the history of standardized shipping containers, how that history has shaped the urban form of seaports such as Tianjin (and linked inland industrial regions), and why the incorporation of shipping containers into an “internet of things” may transform future cities — making “the vast rollout of sensor technology that accompanies [the transformation of shipping containers into network objects possibly] one of the most challenging and meaningful deployments of ubiquitous computing”.