Shipping Containers as Potential Emergency Housing for Haiti

Clemson University's SEED Project opens up a container of ingenuity with an easily mobilized source of emergency housing.

The need for shelter in the wake of the Haiti earthquake is clearly dire. A press release from Clemson University suggests that a cross-department team of faculty members may have a partial solution to the vast need for housing that is simple, relatively inexpensive and easily mobilized.

The Clemson research team calls for the creative repurposing of shipping containers. These ubiquitous metal boxes that are intended to provide shelter for commercial goods as they move across the planet are increasingly idle in the current economic climate. Furthermore, as the Clemson press release indicates, empty and surplus shipping containers are typically found sitting idle in Caribbean shipping ports, putting a potentially valuable feedstock for emergency shelter within close range to the quake-stricken Port-au-Prince region.

The design initiative has been given the name SEED Project, and it is the product of a collaboration between PhD student Pernille Christensen, professor Doug Hecker and professor Martha Skinner. Originally inspired to meet the need for emergency housing left in the wake of a large hurricane common to the US southeast and the Caribbean, the SEED team sees a potentially strong match for their proposed design with the immediate housing need unfolding in Haiti.

Professor Hecker outlines the underpinning for their approach in the Clemson press release:

"Because of the shipping container’s ‘unibody’ construction they are also very good in seismic zones and exceed structural code in the United States and any country in the world," Hecker said. "They have also been used in other countries as emergency shelters in the case of earthquakes. As the SEED Project develops this will certainly be an area that we incorporate. With a few simple cuts at the port, a storage container can be turned into something that is livable and opens to the site."

Beyond the technical and structural merits the SEED Project embodies, there are invaluable human and community aspects that arise from allowing people to promptly return to their land with the aid of such an emergency shelter approach, which Christensen describes:

"You get people back in their communities and it strengthens those communities," Christensen said. "They work on their home, not a temporary shelter, and then they work with their neighbors to rebuild the neighborhood. It leads to a healthier and safer community. And these are places often in dire need of better housing."

Kudos to the Clemson team and the SEED Project for the combination of compassion and cleverness; it's precisely this sort of heartfelt creative energy that will be crucial to the long rebuilding process with which Haiti will no doubt need the world's assistance.

Photo courtesy of RO/LU, via Wikimedia Commons