At Home in the Box: Shipping Container Housing, Logistics and the Crisis of Social Reproduction

Keywords: housing, logistics, shipping container, social reproduction, circulation
Session Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper discusses the standardized shipping container as commodity. Analyzing the object and relations of the shipping container, we trace the afterlives of the growing surplus of these uniform boxes in the United States. Among these uses of surplus, we take up shipping container homes in their varied forms, including informal, precarious and luxury housing in rural and urban sites. The shipping container is situated within ‘regimes of property’ that facilitate exploitation across the circuit of social reproduction, from financial speculation on the home to both violent and mute forms of relative surplus value extraction throughout the logistics supply chain. The shipping container is both objectification of these mutually constituting exploitations and metaphor for the alienation of our social activity.

Our aim is to grasp the correspondences, subjectivity-formations and autonomies that allow for housing struggles, particularly in their shipping container form, to be connected with other moments of struggle in production, circulation and social reproduction. Alongside the traditional figures of capitalist social relations–workers, bosses, the unemployed–we see a new set of personifications emerge: tenants, asset holders, financial rentiers, gendered and racialized gig workers and debtors. Several questions ensue: If the shipping container is the archetypal representation of capitalist modularity, even of exchange value, then what explains the surplus of containers sitting unused in port hinterlands, or implemented for indirect uses in housing and infrastructure? And what are the social property relations that presuppose, and reproduce, this articulation of logistics and housing?