This dissertation follows the images of shipping containers in my memories and experiences, to explore strategic movements, settlements and unsettlements of a transnational subject and its identity finding its location in the city of Shenzhen, Melbourne and London. I put emphasis on the aspects of strategic as an overlay across two types of movement that follows flows of global capital emerged in the late 20th century. One, the development of intermodal container shipping in the commercial logistics network; the other describes the characteristics of the practice of migration among Chinese emigrants moving away from China since the country entered the global economy in the 1980s. Through observing the movement of the shipping container in the three port cities, I will reflect on my own subjectivity being a Chinese emigrant moving overseas for better opportunities of work and education.  

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Methodology  

The lens I take to observe shipping containers from is the architectural perspective. I argue, shipping containers can guide towards new understanding on the construction of architectural space. Shipping containers are embedded in a larger network of logistics and oceanic infrastructure, which has been studied extensively in fields of geography, economics, political science and global studies.[1] In this context, my research will also reveal potential for architectural history and theory to intersect with other disciplines. By inviting an interdisciplinary approach to redefine architectural space, structure and technology allows progressive impact on architectural practice.  

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Aaron Tobey reviewed the positions of shipping container in its state of moving through the set of port structure emerged from the process of containerisation.[2] The shipping container, as a transferable and economically scalable standardised unit, informs a new conception of space that challenges the traditional understanding of architecture that often privileges the formal and morphological attributes of building. Such attributes are often considered as timeless and static. In the context of individualistic neoliberal economy and late capitalist expansion, the shipping containers compresses space and time into one capsule connecting labour, resources and value as part of a supply chain around the globe.[3] Thus, mobility of shipping containers suggests the capacity of architecture to embody multiple temporalities and become a flexible technological agency. As an agency distributing resources within the global supply chain, when the shipping container gets stuck in transit, it can cause blockage in the smooth flow of capital, revealing vulnerability of the networks of people and goods concealed behind capital.[4] From another perspective, the shipping container can lead to reimagination of what constitutes architecture, particularly how functionally, it can become an active force to resist capitalist fluidity rather than passive acceptance of formal construction.[5]

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Architecture of the shipping container will be perceived as a fluid concept in this thesis, as it trespasses different fields of knowledge in interpreting movements of goods and people around the globe. For the purpose of understanding my transnational identity in this thesis, the movement and condition of the shipping container I observe will serve as a metaphor to present the movement of my body and my subjectivity as I encounter Western culture in Melbourne and London as a Chinese emigrant. The term metaphor itself embodies qualities of transit, transaction, movement and belonging.[6] It projects a spatial quality of crossing territories and boundaries in languages and contain meanings of words to be carried or transferred into another context. This will be adopted in the way I narrate my experience: I attempt to give possibilities in which my transnational identity and the experiences of my movement crosses and intersect with the path of shipping container at port terminals in Shenzhen, on railways and roads in Melbourne, and in brownfield sites in London. Such are neutralised, homogenised, distant spaces where capital flows and strives. I am following a methodology of situated and speculative thinking in architecture raised by Isabelle Doucet and Hélène Frichot. By allowing my experiences of passing through passenger terminals, adapting to, and orientating myself in new cities to produce resistant forces contesting against the fluidity of universal, authoritarian conception of urban spaces governed by neoliberal ideology.[7]

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Key ideas and argument 

Upon establishing the agency and metaphor of the shipping container that I will be using throughout my writing. I refer to again, the main enquiry of my dissertation, is to locate my own migrant subjectivity: the Chinese transnational identity. The above conceptions of shipping containers suggest in major, its relationship with global capitalism, which I argue, is central to the metaphoric link between the shipping container and my transnational identity. Global capitalism, in the time of the 1970s and the 1980s, relates to the idea of late capitalism, embodies key attributes of flexibility, fluidity which contradicts against rationality, strategies.[8] Contradictions is how I feel constantly when I attempt to mediate between unfamiliar cultural contexts, framework of knowledge in educational institutions when I encounter new places and experiences. This feeling constrains me, alienates, and disconnects me from finding a sense of belonging as a person moving away from home. In searching for appropriate reflection on this identity I found familiarity in reading works by Aihwa Ong, Rosi Braidotti and Sarah Ahmed – with a focus on transnational Asian identity, flexible citizenship, nomadic and stranger encounters, this body of work act as the theoretical framework in constructing my identity.[9]  

 

In Braidotti and Ahmed’s narrative, subjectivity of a migrant is a constructed and acquired set of knowledge and ways to understand the world. Both Braidotti and Ahmed emphasise the situatedness of subjectivity as a force of resistance to places a migrant encounter and inhabit – Braidotti refers to such as an ‘ecology of belonging’ while Ahmed interprets it as ‘being at home’.[10] Belonging and home in as defined in the world of migrants, is not singular, which is constantly readapting and clings to the subject’s present encounter, memories, and cultural understanding they carry with them. Attachment and belonging felt through in one’s subjectivity come from the inside of a migrant, is well-contented - such is comparable to the relationship between the shipping container and the objects it holds. Without the cargos, the container is an empty shell seemingly absent and overlooked in context of transferring and moving goods. Thus, belonging, like shipping containers, projects an ability of containment of life and materials moving across multiple geographical locations in the world. 

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The relationship between global capitalism and transnational identity is broad yet dynamic. Such can be explored with a more solid and grounded perspective through using the shipping container as a metaphor. I will argue that journeys and histories of the shipping container can metaphorically present the chase for capital, socio-economic power and strategic movement of my Chinese transnational identity.