[Top, the Hampton Roads region, home to the Port of Virginia, and above, the Norfolk International Terminal.]

When a cargo container is offloaded at one of the marine terminals of the Port of Virginia, a funny thing often happens.

Let’s say that the container — which might, for instance, have been loaded in Hong Kong, transited the Pacific Ocean, and crossed the American continents at the Panama Canal — is picked off a container ship by a container gantry crane at the Norfolk International Terminal, one of the four terminals within the Port of Virginia’s distributed network of terminals around the Hampton Roads region.  There is a good chance that it will then be loaded onto a double-stack railcar by a straddle carrier or rubber-tyred gantry crane, and travel around two hundred miles on the tracks of the Norfolk-Southern Railway to the small city (calling it a city is rather generous) of Front Royal, where it will be offloaded at the Virginia Inland Port. Here’s the funny thing — only then do its contents finally enter the United States of America.

[The Virginia Inland Port in Front Royal, Virginia.]

When the shipping container is (rightly) treated as a transformative technology, it is usually the physical properties of the container that are cited as generating transformations: the standardized measurement of the twenty-foot equivalent unit both permitting and demanding the standardization of port spaces, container ships, and distributive mechanisms like tractor-trailers and railcars, for instance. But the legal properties of the container (which, it should be noted, are only possible because of the physical capacity of the container to be sealed in such a manner that opening it permanently breaks the seal) are also transformative, and it is these weird legal properties that produce the funny situation of goods being two hundred miles inside a nation’s borders and yet still, for all intents and purposes, in a foreign country.

In the rather dry manner typical of government bureaucracies, the U.S. Customs and Border Protections explain this in one of their key publications, “Importing into the United States: A Guide for Commercial Importers” (pdf):

“Imported goods are not legally entered until after the shipment has arrived within the port of entry, delivery of the merchandise has been authorized by CBP, and estimated duties have been paid.”

The shipping container, you see, is something of a minature, portable, re-definable border. When it is sealed, goods are frozen in their country of origin, and cannot be removed from that country through any physical operation short of breaking the seal and stealing them. In this way, the shipping container is like a bizarre embassy: portable instead of stationary, for goods instead of people, logistical instead of architectural, but similarly self-contained and exported territory. Both the shipping container and the embassy reveal that borders are, at the same time, fictional — receiving their status as entities that exist through the agreement to treat them as though they exist, and thus being as malleable as we collectively decide we want them to be — and quite capable of affecting material relations, as noting that they are fictional by no means implies that they lack the capacity to draw geographies or generate landscapes.

[Port of Hong Kong; source.]

Having been granted this status, the container becomes legally frictionless, able to transcend borders and geographies freely, at least until it arrives at a customs station. To move through a country, a container never needs to enter that country; it can exist solely within the legal weightlessness of foreign trade zones¹, even serving as a microcosm of those legal states when it exits their spatial boundaries (such as when it travels from a seaport to an inland port of entry). The goods in a container loaded and sealed in Hong Kong remain legally in China, no matter what soil the container rests on, until such a time as the owner decides to have them processed at a customs station.

Yes, this is a restricted geography. A container cannot arrive at a seaport, bypass customs, and travel freely within the country of destination; but within that restricted geography — along rail-lines and in anonymous stacks — the container is oddly weightless. No person could arrive at the border of the United States, declare himself a microcosm of China, and travel freely to the airport customs line of her choosing; the comparative freedom granted to the movement of goods seems appropriately representative of the relative primacy of consumer goods in the post-Fordist economy. Perversely, the container is even co-opted by people desperate to emigrate from or immigrate to certain nation-states — essentially, people attempt to pass as goods, in order to obtain the legal advantages conveyed on goods.

[A gantry crane operates at an intermodal facility in North Baltimore, Ohio; source.]

The connection may not be immediately obvious but this — all of this, including the transformative physical properties of the container briefly noted above — is why the architectural fetish for the form of the container is ultimately unsatisfying. Even though the spatial qualities of the box are transformative, the form of the container is ultimately not what it is interesting about the container; what is interesting and important about the container is the way that it enables and generates new landscapes. This is not to say that is impossible to do interesting architecture with shipping containers. It is just as possible to do interesting architecture with shipping containers as it is possible to do interesting architecture with chain-link fence, corrugated aluminum, or any other industrial material. But the power of the shipping container cannot be appropriated by using the object in alternate contexts, because the power of the object comes from its capacity to shape its context.

Keller Easterling said this well in a 1999 piece for Perspecta, “The New Orgman”; though the portion of the piece that we quote here refers to the architecture of mid-century suburbia, the piece later touches on ports and containers, and the quote applies equally well to the container:

“The architecture [is] organizational. The organizational protocol [is] not merely that which facilitate[s] architecture; it [is] architecture… For architects, nouns and objects that can be identified with formal nomenclature are more familiar than processes, verbs, and games. It is hard to grasp the idea that the medium is the message or that the organization is the content.”

Hard, but worthwhile.

1. BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh interviews Greg Lindsay, co-author (with John Kasarda) of the recently-released Aerotropolis.  (If you aren’t familiar with the thesis of the book, you might begin with Lindsay’s recent article in the Financial Times.)  The interview is quite interesting, and in places I agree fully with Lindsay’s comments.  For instance:

“I think the examples of Memphis and Louisville are fascinating, where the sheer economic force of FedEx and UPS basically willed them into being.

Those cities used to be river-trading towns—cotton and tobacco, respectively—before they became basically southern rustbelt towns. But then, in the 1970s and 80s, they were reborn as company towns of FedEx and UPS. In a sense, their economics—for better or for worse, and that’s very much up for debate—are held hostage by our e-commerce habits: every time we press the one-click button on Amazon, it leads to this gigantic logistical mechanism which, in turn, has led to the creation of these vast warehouse districts around the airports of these two cities.

One of the things I tried to touch on in the book is that even actions we think of as primarily virtual lead to the creation of gigantic physical systems and superstructures without us even knowing it.”

It also seems that Lindsay is quite reflective about the topic, as his critical comments on the relationship between aerotropolis and autocracy or his description of the aerotropolis as a weapon in a “war between cities” make clear, and there’s much to commend in the interview (both in the questions, and in the answers).

2. However, I’m not convinced that the aerotropolis as Lindsay describes it — a city which is “more closely tied to other cities via air than its own hinterlands” — really exists, or is even possible.  Matter matters, and only a little bit of matter and relatively few people (at great energy cost) can realistically be transported frequently by air [1].  Maybe 100 million Chinese tourists really will be flying abroad in 2020 — but even that massive quantity is only one out of every thirteen Chinese (on China’s current population), and those 100 million wouldn’t be people whose lives are characterized by air travel, but people whose lives occasionally — perhaps annually, perhaps bi-annually — feature air travel on special occasions.

3.More interesting than quibbling about the nature of aerotropolis, though, is Lindsay’s assertion that aerotropolis is crystallized globalization:

“The notion of the aerotropolis, then, is basically that air travel is what globalization looks like in urban form. It is about flows of people and goods and capital, and it implies that to be connected to a city on the far side of the world matters more than to be connected to your immediate region.”

It seems to me that the “aerotropolis” (particularly on the more restricted Kasarda definition) is more a symbol of globalization than it is the ultimate instantiation of globalization.  Sea shipping is (and was for centuries before the invention of flight) the dominant mode of global transport.  To get an indication of the difference in magnitude between sea and air shipping, just look at Shanghai, the world’s busiest cargo port by tonnage, and Memphis, the world’s busiest airport by tonnage: Memphis sees about three million tons a year; Shanghai sees around five hundred million tons a year.  This is not a statistical aberration.

[Yangshan Deepwater port, off the coast of Shanghai -- merely one of Shanghai's many container-handling facilities; image source.]

If you want to connect to the global economy you build a port.  (Karrie Jacobs: “Even Dubai, which seems to demonstrate how a good airport (and a state-owned airline) can make a city materialize from thin air, initially tested the economic value of a free-trade zone on the Persian Gulf by building a state-of-the-art shipping port.”)  Failing that, you build an inland port, to receive and distribute goods from a sea port.  Yes, if you want to connect to certain specific components of the global economy which require high-value and high-speed material transactions (the small auto-parts industry, for instance), you build an airport, but, just as with the movement of people, that’s a special case, not the baseline.

Even Air Cargo World (which has an obvious interest in air cargo boosterism) admits that sea shipping is hardly the way of the past:

Four years ago this month, Giovanni Bisignani, the director general and CEO of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), sounded the alarm to airfreight experts assembled at the IATA World Cargo Symposium in Mexico City.

“Ocean container shipping is becoming more competitive and taking business away,” Bisignani told the audience during his opening address. He then rattled off some startling numbers. Growth in the ocean sector from 2000 to 2005 more than doubled airfreight growth, and from 2006 to 2010, ocean freight was to outpace annual air cargo growth by nearly 2 percent.

“New container ships are faster and cheaper to operate,” he continued. “2006 ocean container freight rates were 20 percent in real terms below 2000 levels. Airfreight rates were only 8 percent lower. … We can expect more intense price competition”

…

Now that a resurgence is taking place in both the ocean and air cargo industries, shippers are starting to plan for the future. It’s been reported that shippers who once operated only in the sky and had  gone to the water are making the shift back to air cargo, but there isn’t enough evidence to suggest a trend is underway. A lot is happening in the shipping industry, and it’s difficult to say how many shippers are returning to the skies, just as it can’t be said that some shippers will remain sea-bound forever. As with most things, the issue isn’t clear cut.

“I have seen some conversion of sea to air, and we certainly saw it for a lot of 2010,” Shah says. “I don’t know if that trend is still continuing. It probably is, but it probably depends and the commodity, and it depends on the industry.”

If you’re looking for a physical instantiation of the ways that contemporary globalization is radically different than 19th-century globalization (and you’re not satisfied with the shipping container, which really is one of the most important innovations of the twentieth century), then I’d suggest that the tubes are a better place to start than the airports.

[Container shipping in the aerotropolis of Dubai -- like Shanghai, one of many terminals.]

4. I do wonder if there is an element of unintentional bias operating in the formulation of Lindsay and Karsada’s theses?  If you’re wealthy (or fortunate enough, like I am, to be middle-class in a country where the middle-class is wealthy by global standards), you might connect to the world by flying around it; but if you’re not, you probably connect to the world — experience globalization — through the products you participate in the manufacture, design, storage, marketing, or sales of, the products you purchase, and/or the raw materials that you participate (directly or indirectly) in the extraction of.  If your experience primarily falls into the former category — experiencing the world by traveling it in airplanes — it would be unsurprising if this biased you towards overestimating the significance of airports as drivers of urbanization, and underestimating the impact of the latter items on urbanization.

5. All that said, the existence of the aerotropolis, whatever its fate, future, and ultimate importance is, seems undeniable, and so I’m convinced that this is an important and fascinating phenomenon, well worth studying.

[In return, Greg Lindsay interviews BLDGBLOG.  Lindsay and Manaugh will be continuing these conversations at upcoming live events -- click through to BLDGBLOG's interview for details.  Elsewhere, Kazys Varnelis reacts -- with appropriate suspicion about the future prospects for jet-setting global citizens of the aerotropoli -- to commentary and chatter surrounding the release of Aerotropolis.]

Bridging the gap between mammoth’s interest in infrastructure, global logistics, economies, and really, really big things is this announcement from Moller-Maersk:

Danish shipper Moller-Maersk, the biggest container carrier, confirmed Monday it has signed a contract for a South Korean shipyard to build it 10 giant container ships over the next three years… The new container vessels, at 400 metres long, 59 metres wide and 73 metres tall, will be “the largest vessel of any type known to be in operation,” but emit half as much carbon dioxide as the industry average for Asia/Europe trade, the statement added.

Purchasing your own fleet of carriers will set you back $2bn.

[The Georg Maersk - 9074 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units - typical shipping containers are forty feet long, meaning each count for 2 TEU). The new ships will be approximately 18,000 TEU.]

[Photos via Maersk, h/t to Telstar Logistic]

1. Dave Roberts reviews two books on the future of automotive transportation — Traffic and Reinventing the Automobile — in the American Prospect, primarily discussing “USVs”, the descendant of MIT’s CityCar.  Roberts’ review explains why mammoth is so excited about CityCar as an architectural tool:

Where the vision tips over from cool-for-car-nerds into mind-blowing is not in the car itself but in how it’s connected to the power grid, other cars, and the city around it. Most cars are parked about 95 percent of the time. All those idle batteries add up to considerable energy-storage capacity. Having a place to store electricity is important because America’s power system, like its cars and parking infrastructure, is overbuilt, scaled to meet peak demand. With a place to store surplus electricity when it’s made and release it when it’s needed, system engineers can “shave the peak.”

The authors envision USVs converging with other technologies — rooftop solar panels, small wind turbines, geothermal heat pumps, cogeneration systems, large-scale batteries, smart grids — to create a new kind of power system in which cities are generating, managing, and distributing all or most of their own electricity. This kind of local, distributed power system will eliminate the high cost of transmission lines bringing power from a distance, reduce smog and other particulate pollution, eliminate dependence on foreign energy, and, at the limit, make possible carbon-neutral cities…

[A] “Mobility Internet” could lead to the same kind of innovation unleashed by the Internet itself. Among other things, it could enable a revolution in civic management of road, parking, and power services. Currently the large majority of roads and a great deal of parking is free, and as any economist will tell you, an unpriced resource will be overused. Sure enough, road and parking demand frequently exceed supply, leading to congestion, a good chunk of which, Traffic reminds us, is created by people driving around looking for parking (“parking foreplay” also causes one in five urban collisions). Although power isn’t free, it’s generally sold at a flat rate, leaving consumers no way of knowing when it’s most valuable.

Toll roads and congestion charges are crude attempts to change the situation. Once the devices that consume road, parking, and power services are connected to the Internet, however, cities can institute variable, real-time, citywide pricing for those resources, based on the balance of supply and demand moment to moment. This could radically increase the productivity of resource use, compensating at least in part for the expense of building these systems. Cities would become more like organisms, their subsystems controlled and coordinated by a unified nervous system. (Water and sewage systems could be integrated to the digital grid as well and even used as backup energy storage — but that’s another story.)

Ryan Avent picks up on the Roberts article, discussing regulatory barriers to innovation in automotive transport and then clarifying his thoughts in a second post.

[Modelling global shipping routes, from Pablo Kaluza et al.'s “The complex network of global cargo ship movements”, via Infectious Greed]

2. Meanwhile, cities on the West Coast prepare infrastructure for the impending arrival of mass-produced electric cars.

3. Back on the East Coast, the Obama administration approves financial aid for the construction of the first two new nuclear reactors in the United States since the seventies.  mammoth applauds, and hopes that we can look forward to visiting an American La Hague in a decade or two.

4. The Danish shipping giant Maersk is pioneering the development of “super slow shipping”, or the intentional operation of container ships at lower speeds to realize greater energy efficiency, decreasing both fuel consumption (which is profitable) and carbon emissions.

5. Chicago and the Army Corps of Engineers ponder undoing the reversal of the Chicago River, in a “last-ditch effort to prevent the Asian carp from decimating the $7 billion Great Lakes fishing industry”; the de-reversal is heavily opposed by the Great Lakes shipping industry, and would require re-thinking Chicago’s constructed urban hydrology, as flood control measures depend on the current configuration to deal with peak flooding.

[link 2 via @bldgblog, link 5 via Delta National Park]