ABSTRACT
A recent report in The Guardian newspaper (Neate 2013) discussed the increasing size of contemporary container ship designs, with the newest Triple-E Class vessels capable of carrying up to 18,000 TEU’s (or twenty-foot equivalent unit containers) at any one time. Although one has to be cognisant of the desire to overtly fetishise such figures (especially the tendency for equivalencies: for example, Triple-E’s will be able to carry containers that would fill a train 68 miles long (Neate 2013)), these are important registers both of the continued global strategic power of the container shipping industry, as well as the technological sophistication of such maritime architecture. For example, their scale is likely to have significant effects on the strategic geopower of specific container ports throughout the world: at present no North or South American ports have the capacity to handle vessels of this scale (Neate 2013).
Just as the move to containerisation in the 1970s profoundly altered traditional maritime port communities (Port of London Authority 1979), and the scale of postPanamax vessels shifted the operation of the Panama canal as a container vessel trade route (McCalla 1999), so the increasing scale of the largest container ships has the potential to reconfigure the significance of ports capable of handling these vessels, with China-Europe becoming the key route for this scale of container ship (see Airriess 2001). This story also highlights an important aspect of the relationship between commercial ships and the geographies of globalisation (Dicken 2011). Whilst this has a long historical trajectory (Gilroy 1993; Steinberg 2001; Law 2003; Parker 2010) it is rather telling that as of early 2011 there was a global fleet of nearly 5000 container ships, carrying an equivalent of 14 million containers (Institute of Shipping Economics and Logistics 2011, 5). Above all these figures provide a stark reminder of just how powerful the container shipping industry is both in terms of the geographies of the sea, but also in so many other areas of contemporary society such as retail (Wrigley 2000), manufacturing technologies (Dicken 2011, 181), and geosecurity (Cowen 2010a, 2010b; Martin 2011), to name just three. Indeed for David Harvey the development of intermodal containerisation was ‘one of the great innovations without which we would not have had globalisation, [or] the deindustrialisation of America’ (Harvey, cited in Buchloh, Harvey, and Sekula 2011; also see Shaw and Sidaway 2010, 509). The historical advance of containerisation, whilst not widely disseminated (see
Teräs 2007, 138), has recently garnered a growing amount of attention from within the academic community, some more critically attuned than others (Jackson 1983, 154-155; Hunter 1993; Broeze 2002; Cudahy 2006; Levinson 2006; Cidell 2012; Martin 2012). A key objective of this paper is to demonstrate how these taken-forgranted objects and their attendant handling processes and wider mobilities stand as a marker of decidedly complex articulations of the spatial dynamics of contemporary capitalism (Sekula 1996). In particular, the mobility of containers (Cidell 2012) on a global scale is determined by the infrastructural power of intermodal containerisation, defined as an integrated transport system that makes it commercially feasible to deliver goods door-to-door (Talley 2000, 933-934). Containerisation and its foundations in the systems-driven development of nascent consumer capitalism in the 1950s (Forrester 1958; see Gomes and Mentzer 1988; DeLanda 1991; Allen 1997, 110; Easterling 1999a) offers us a useful vantage point from which to consider the origins of such spatio-temporal ideologies, and how they have grown into a wider assemblage of logistics and supply chain power (Toscano 2011; Neilson 2012; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Kanngieser, 2013). In this paper, I aim to locate the development of the shipping container with spe-
cific regard to the politics of spatio-temporal organisation in the context of shipping mobilities, and the wider geography of ships (Hasty and Peters 2012). As the intermodal qualities of containerisation demonstrate, the overt focus is not with the ship as such, but rather the role of the intermodal container as a bridging device that crosses a variety of transportation interfaces. A fundamental objective of this paper is to argue that the intermodal container emanates out of a genealogy of unitisation within the wider historical geographies of transportation. This genealogical approach (Foucault 1977; Gutting 1990) is utilised in order to identify the forms of organisational logic present within the packing, stowing and handling of pre-containerised, or break-bulk cargo. In this context I develop my core argument concerning the that is, firstly the move towards the spatial regularity of
cubic packing, and secondly the consolidation of these spatial motifs into the total redesign of the cargo handling and transportation system. The arguments proceed as follows. The paper begins by using two UK Govern-
ment-commissioned reports as a backdrop to wider debates on the move towards intermodal containerisation in the 1950s and 60s, and particularly the shifts in the organisation of space-time, as well as more subtle material practices and procedures. Whilst the impact on the urban and economic geographies of cities throughout the world cannot be underplayed (Goldblatt and Hagel 1963; Banham 1967; Smith 1989; Sekula 2000; Harvey 2010, 16), the main remit of this section is to focus on the context of traditional pre-intermodal forms of cargo packing and handling. It is also to argue that the supposed paradigm shift that containerisation embodied, or the so-called ‘container revolution’ (Schmeltzer and Peavy 1970), was actually much more gradual. Prior to the development of full-scale intermodal containerisation in the late 1960s, spatial efficiencies in the form of cargo handling and ordering was present. Where, perhaps, these practices differ from intermodal containerisation was in the localised approaches to modes of spatial ordering. The key conceptual foundation of this argument comes from Pye’s (1964) notion of shape-determining systems, and I utilise this to differentiate between localised means of spatio-temporal organisation in the stowage of break-bulk cargo and the move towards universalised forms associated with unitisation, mechanisation and automation. The next section focuses on the development of unitised forms of cargo packaging
in the form of pallets, crates and particularly non-standardised containers as embryonic versions of the later fully standardised intermodal containers. Setting these within a broader techno-aesthetic context of regularisation, unitisation and serial logic (Giedion 1948; Sekula 1996; Easterling 1999b) it is argued that nascent forms of packaged efficiency were present with these early non-standardised containers, particularly with regard to these containers as enclosed spatial units exhibiting uniformity of shape and thus some of the spatial efficiencies of the intermodal container (Bohlman 2001). The section following this addresses the extension of packaged efficiencies into
what I term totalised or systematised, packaged efficiencies. So whilst the utilisation of cubic space in the design of non-standardised containers provided one form of packaged efficiency, the wider packaging of the entire freight transport system was not evident. The spatial homogenisation of cargo shape represented a developing sense of organisational logic, but up until this point in the late 1960s it also confirmed the inconsistencies in the attendant infrastructure of cargo handling and mobility. This differs with intermodalism where we see the distribution of the same logic of
efficiency and control across the entire transport infrastructure, embracing both the shipping industry, as well as the road and rail freight sectors. Following the wider discussions concerning orderings in the previous sections the conceptual bedrock of this section is the issue of stabilisation through standardisation. I look to the attempts to stabilise the interconnections between the various elements of the cargo handling system, in part to consider the notion of controlling inter-changeability through the delegation of effort from localised to universal procedures. This bears on my central idea of totalised packaging of efficiency, where the improvised tactics of early modes of spatial organisation are consolidated into a tightly coupled apparatus of standardised and universalised approaches.
