WO R K S T H AT WO R K A M AGA Z I N E O F U N E X P E C T E D C R E AT I V I T Y I S S U E 2 , 2013
D E S I G N T H AT B R I N G S T H E WO R L D C L O S E R
A Boeing 747 approaches Schiphol Airport. In today’s hyper-connected world, design, from ideas as simple as the intermodal container to projects as massive as the Boeing 747, can have profound and unexpected consequences for people and cultures all over the planet. Photo: Peter BiĞak
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In the previous issue we described our editorial policy as the gathering of design-related stories that would make for interesting discussion with friends over dinner. To continue with this metaphor, I’m glad that we’ve got together for another meal and that the conversation is again international in scope. It takes us back to Schiphol Airport, which we’ve already visited, but this time we’re going outside for a look at the noise-reducing landscaping around the runway. While we’re there, we’re quite likely to see a Boeing 747, and we’ll recount the story of how it unexpectedly became the most successful commercial airplane ever built. Originally meant to be primarily a cargo plane, it was designed around the specifications of the intermodal container, a seemingly simple box whose impact on the whole world has been surprisingly complex. This invention marked the beginning of one aspect of globalisation, but an anthropologist in Hong Kong explains how globalisation is experienced in the developing world, as myriad independent traders smuggle mobile phones in their suitcases from Hong Kong to Africa. Smuggling is the main theme of another story: how top chefs smuggle vital ingredients past French customs for an international culinary contest. There are a couple of side topics, such as a plan to build an international tunnel under the Alps and how a simple portable lamp benefits rural communities in Africa. Dinner is served. — Peter Biľak
Works That Work, Issue 2, 2013 A Magazine of Unexpected Creativity Published twice a year by Typotheque issn: 2214-0158
Edited by: Peter Biľak Copy editing: Ted Whang Artefacts section: Anne Miltenburg Proofreading: Johanna Robinson Design: Atelier Carvalho Bernau Typeset in Lava and Elementar from Typotheque Contact: Typotheque Zwaardstraat 16 2584 TX Den Haag The Netherlands editor@worksthatwork.com worksthatwork.com @worksthatwork Subscriptions: Exclusively online on worksthatwork.com/subscribe Special thanks to Johanna Biľak Contributions: We are always looking for new themes and articles in various forms. Please send us your proposals and something about yourself. Try to be as specific as possible: explain what the subject is and why you want to cover it.
Contributors to this issue: Rob Cameron, journalist, Prague Deciwatt, London DroogLab, Amsterdam Barbara Eldredge, design writer, New York Matteo Ferroni, architect, Magione Kester Freriks, writer, Amsterdam Jessica Hilltout, photographer, Brussels Paul Hilton, photographer, Hong Kong Ed van Hinte, design writer, The Hague Florentijn Hofman, artist, Rotterdam Paul de Kort, artist, De Meern Bonjwing Lee, photographer, Kansas City Marc Levinson, writer, Washington DC Gordon Mathews, anthropologist, Hong Kong Viljami Pirttimaa, photographer, Helsinki Michael Rakowitz, artist, Chicago Daan Roosegaarde, designer, Waddinxveen Suzanne Wales, design writer, Barcelona Hans Wilschut, photographer, Rotterdam ‘Thresholds of Silence’ translated from Dutch by Simon Benson. Front cover: Mobile telephone base station camouflaged as a tree in Johannesburg, South Africa. From the photo series ‘The Largest Man Made Forest in the World’ by Hans Wilschut. Unlike the original, this photo reproduction was flipped horizontally. Inside cover poster: A giant Rubber Duck by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman floats in Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong. Photo: Felix Wong / South China Morning Post Made and printed in the Netherlands ©2013 by Typotheque. All rights reserved.
Help us to eliminate advertising and improve the magazine. We are striving for an ad-free periodical supported entirely by readers. Until we reach the subscription numbers that we need to make the project self-sustaining, we need your help. Become a WTW patron, and in return receive copies of the magazine, a limited edition print (from one of our photo-contributors), your name printed in the magazine and on the website, and a personal thank you note. Your donation is tax deductable. The result will be a reader-funded magazine produced exclusively for its readers, without any interference from advertisers. Just you and us, celebrating the wonders of human creativity together. The following people helped to make the second issue of WTW: Jo De Baerdemaeker Jason Dilworth Etsy Konrad Glogowski Geir Goosen Folkert Gorter Frith Kerr (Studio Frith) Andrej Krátky Benjamin Listwon Resolume VJ Software Jay Rutherford Mark Simonson Martin Tiefenthaler Typefounding Chao Chun Wang Mark Webster (Free Art Bureau) Dana Wooley worksthatwork.com/patrons
In this issue:
Artefacts
by Anne Miltenburg
Thresholds of Silence
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Chungking Mansions — The World Inside the Building
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Peter Biľak speaks to Gordon Mathews
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by Kester Freriks Ancient wisdom and modern art come together in an innovative project to reduce the noise pollution produced by Schiphol airport.
The Unexpected Success of the Boeing 747
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by Ed van Hinte The 747, the product of a complex, demanding collaborative design process, became an icon of the modern age, much to Boeing’s surprise.
Grassroots Football
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by Jessica Hilltout
One building in Hong Kong houses a diverse international community that has a major impact on trade all over Africa and Asia.
A Hole in the Darkness
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by Suzanne Wales Even a simple portable lamp has the potential to improve people’s lives, but only if it is introduced with respect for their culture.
The Largest Man-Made Forest in the World
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by Hans Wilschut
Tunnel to the Other Side
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by Rob Cameron A tunnel to Yugoslavia would have simplified the trip from landlocked Czechoslovakia to the sea… …if Cold War politics hadn’t interfered.
The Box That Shrank the World
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by Marc Levinson The lowly, inelegant container has been the key to a revolution that continues to shape the everyday lives of nearly everyone in the world.
Smuggler Chefs by Barbara Eldredge Success in this prestigious international competition depends not only on the chefs’ culinary skills, but also on their smuggling techniques.
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Anne Miltenburg is a designer based in The Hague. An inveterate traveller, she has lived and worked across Europe, and in Mali, South Korea, Australia and the US.
Artefacts
YOUR VOTES, PLEASE Cairo, Egypt
Ideas given shape in ingenious ways by people across the world in order to solve problems big and small.
In the aftermath of the 2011 revolution, the Egyptian interim government soon faced its first design challenge: how to ensure that all people, in a country with an illiteracy rate of 32%, would be able to cast their votes. Taking cues from India, where the concept was first conceived, the democracy-to-be introduced a pictorial language. Each aspiring representative was randomly allocated a visual symbol to use in their campaign—a sun, donkey, umbrella and lawn mower amongst others—allowing illiterate voters to identify the candidates on the voting ballot. Old structures of power were not so easily designed away, however. Newcomers on the political scene complained that symbols associated with the most positive meanings—the camel (strength and patience), the crescent (religious piety), and the date tree (bearing nutritious fruit)—were given to associates of former president Hosni Mubarak. Photo: Reporters / AP
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PARASITES New York City, United States
SMART HIGHWAY Waddinxveen, the Netherlands
The warm steam clouds spilling from buildings’ air vents onto the streets on cold winter days are one of the signature features of New York City. MIT graduate and conceptual artist Michael Rakowitz realised the vents’—literally— untapped potential for the homeless. Using five dollars’ worth of trash bags, ziplock bags and clear waterproof packing tape, he created custommade ‘ParaSITE’ shelters to provide homeless people with a cheap, warm place to sleep. Each shelter is made to the specific demands of the future inhabitant. One science fiction fan requested a shape reminiscent of Jabba the Hutt; a couple requested two separate sitting areas connected by a ‘love tunnel’; another just wanted a cocoon to roll up in. Each ParaSITE features more or fewer windows, depending on the inhabitants’ feelings regarding privacy or their desire to have a view. The ziplock bags in the walls can be used to store or display personal belongings. Photo courtesy of Michael Rakowitz and Lombard Freid Gallery.
When we think about sustainable automobile transportation, we usually think about the vehicle. But what if you redesign the road? Designer Daan Roosegaarde created Smart Highway: a more sustainable road-marking system using technology that is built straight into the tarmac. An interactive lighting system tracks cars, illuminating only the part of the road in use. Dynamic paint enables the dividing lines to change according to traffic situations. The highway can also display up-to-date information such as dangerous weather conditions and traffic jams. Using glow-in-the-dark technology that is charged during the day, the graphics are visible at night for up to ten hours. The Smart Highway is not just a futuristic dream: Roosegaarde teamed up with Heijmans Infrastructure to begin implementation on selected Dutch highways in the summer of 2013. Photo courtesy of Studio Roosegaarde.
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OPEN HOUSE Levittown, NY, United States
BLINDSQUARE Helsinki, Finland
True to their original purpose as sleeper-towns, many US suburbs have become economic deserts, and most of their inhabitants commute to work in nearby cities. The economic crisis has struck these middle-class neighbourhoods hard, and people are struggling to supplement their income. ‘Open House’, a concept by design studios DroogDesign and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is an experiment in small-scale economic activity. A dozen homeowners in Levittown were paired with designers to discover services that they could provide in their own homes. The results varied from serious scenarios such as a home-made dinner takeaway and an after-hours school for adults, to tongue-in-cheek initiatives such as an attention clinic where you can find the listening ears of an elderly couple, or a vacation try-out store where you can practice your upcoming holiday. During a one-day Open House, homeowners raised a total of US$2,500.
The ubiquitous digital traces we leave throughout our cities can now be put to good use. The new smartphone app BlindSquare, developed in Helsinki, uses GPS, online maps and the recommendations of social media users to guide the visually impaired. Users can get directions through voice feedback based on their exact location, and can also save locations for future use—handy if you want to find that great grocery store again, or the house of a new friend. In addition to these functions, the app offers users extra features such as location-based recommendations: when walking down the street, users can receive tips on great cafés, social events or businesses they pass along their way. BlindSquare pulls this information from reviews on the popular app Foursquare, opening up a whole new world previously invisible to its users and therefore beyond their reach.
Photo courtesy of DroogLab.
Photo: Viljami Pirttimaa
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LIFE IMITATING NATURE Wenchuan County, China
LIGHTING THE WAY London, United Kingdom
At Wolong National Nature Reserve, Chinese scientists face the challenge of caring for a population of 150 giant pandas and reintroducing them into the wild to support this highly endangered species. The adult pandas have lost the skills needed to survive independently of humans, so the reserve staff focus their efforts on the newborn cubs. In order to teach the cubs real panda ways, any contact with their domesticated parents or humans has to be avoided. The scientists came up with a cunning plan: by dressing up as pandas, and mimicking natural panda behaviour, they hope to teach the cubs by example. Despite their best efforts, only two giant pandas have been successfully reintroduced to their natural habitat in the past 30 years.
Over 1.5 billion people on the planet have no reliable access to electricity. They rely on biomass fuels for lighting the long, dark evenings. The expense and health risks pose a severe limit to their opportunities for study and home employment. Designers have been trying to develop cheap, sustainable lighting for a long time, but perhaps Martin Riddiford and Jim Reeves have come up with the best solution to date. Their GravityLight cleverly uses a dynamo that is charged by a pulley system. Attaching a weight to the lamp and pulling the strap takes only three seconds and can provide up to 30 minutes of light as the weight descends, driving the dynamo. GravityLight is currently in testing, and its backers aim to create a mass-produced version to be distributed by NGOs and governments at a cost of US$5 per lamp.
Photo:Â Reporters / AP
Photo courtesy of Deciwatt.
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Ancient wisdom and modern art come together in an innovative project to reduce the noise pollution produced by Schiphol airport.
The 33-hectare project includes a series of wedge-shaped hills extending 1.5m (5 ft) above ground level and 1.5m below, as well as tree barriers and other vegetation.
This landscape, proven to significantly reduce noise levels, also provides a place for recreational and cultural activities. Photo: Paul de Kort
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Kester Freriks is a Dutch writer of fiction and non-fiction born in Jakarta. He has been writing for NRC Handelsblad about art and nature daily since 1981. In landscape art he finds an ideal example of the way art and nature influence each other.
THRESHOLDS OF SILENCE It is a brisk December day. We are travelling southwest from Amsterdam through Haarlemmermeer. It is polder country, a spacious lowlands that used to be the bed of a vast lake. Broad and flat, it was an ideal place to build an airport, and indeed in 1916 the Dutch military built an airport here which later expanded and evolved into Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, a primary air traffic hub not only for the Netherlands, but for Western Europe as well. Haarlemmermeer, however, also proved to be ideal for other purposes, and Schiphol is surrounded by extensively developed areas, including relatively large cities and agricultural zones. This is one of the most densely populated areas of the country, and the noise produced by the airport is a problem that has plagued several thousand people in the Haarlemmermeer Municipality, especially in its main town, Hoofddorp. When you think about aircraft noise pollution, the first thing that comes to mind is often the roar of planes in the sky overhead, but as we cross the polder, we can hear the annoying
low-frequency drone called ground-level noise. This is the rumbling din produced mainly during take-off, a noise that propagates just over the surface of the earth. When Schiphol planned the construction of its longest runway, the 3.8km (2.4 mi.) Polderbaan, they publicised its outlying location as a measure that would reduce the impact of ground-level noise on the surrounding communities, but in the end the problem was actually exacerbated. Ground-level noise, particularly in Hoofddorp, but also to the north in Halfweg, Spaarndam and Beverwijk, and even 28km (17.4 mi.) from Schiphol in Castricum, became a perpetual nuisance that ignited years of discussion regarding environmental norms and governmental regulations. Ground-level noise is notoriously difficult to control, defying conventional sound barriers, but in this agricultural area, farmers have known for centuries that a ploughed field with deep furrows produces a deep, restful silence. By contrast, the flat, dense polder serves as an enormous soundboard, especially in winter when the ground is hard and bare. Jet engines on
Amsterdam Airport Schiphol is located in one of the most densely populated areas of the country, and aircraft noise is a problem in the surrounding cities.
Low-frequency ground noise created at take-off is especially difficult to combat because standard noise barriers are largely ineffective against it. Schiphol
is implementing acoustical landscaping in the form of large ridges that dampen longer wavelengths. Photo: Paul de Kort
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In 2012 more than 51 million passengers passed through Schiphol on one of the 437,904 flights to and from destinations as diverse as Seattle, Curaçao, Hong Kong, Islamabad and Lagos. That’s an average of about 1,200 flights every day, or one flight every 1.2 seconds.
the Polderbaan, straining at full power to take off, send a booming roar surging out across a level plain that features no hills, valleys or other obstacles to hinder it. This observation was the starting point of a collective effort by a number of organisations to realise an innovative project in Haarlemmermeer. The group includes Schiphol airport itself, the Municipality of Haarlemmermeer, the city of Hoofddorp, and Stichting Mainport en Groen, a foundation which manages much of the land around Schiphol and is dedicated to the creation of recreational facilities in this area. The group engaged research institute TNO Delft to do a preliminary technical study of the effect of the plough furrows on the noise levels. The results were indisputable: the furrows, combined with vegetation, could produce a sizeable noise reduction. H+N+S Landscape Architects began to create long parallel ridges over the 33-hectare area between the Polderbaan and Hoofddorp. The result, while extremely functional, was not very inviting. Could the area be made more attractive, more amenable to recreation and leisure activities? Enter landscape artist Paul de Kort. In the Netherlands we have been organising and orchestrating our landscape for centuries. We reclaim land and then flood it again; we push water back or drain it away. But de Kort is inspired by nature, often working from historical maps to rediscover the original contours of the land. In his words, ‘natural forces, guided by the laws of nature, make wonderful drawings in the landscape, such as the ripples left behind on the beach by the wind and waves’. De Kort
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transformed the long, sterile stretches of the ridges into a playfully convoluted landscape, and the new project was christened Buitenschot Landscape Art Park, A Soundscape for Schiphol-Hoofddorp. On this brisk December day I am standing with de Kort somewhere between the Polderbaan and the north side of Hoofddorp. It strikes me just how immense the former expanse of water was, a sort of inland sea. The two control towers of Schiphol rise high above the horizon. Excavators with heavy machinery guided by precision GPS are ‘ploughing’, creating enormous ridges 1.5m (5 ft) high flanked by furrows equally deep. The ridges are absolutely straight, laid out at right angles to the direction of the noise and spaced 11m (36.1 ft) apart. The freshly dug polder clay is grey, like the winter sky above us. It shines, creating a landscape of contrasts: light and shadow, ridge and furrow, art and science, past and present. The dense, heavy earth meets the elusive, yet no less intense, forces of noise. ‘Ground-level noise crumbles, as it were, in the spaces between the furrows,’ says de Kort, and indeed when you enter those spaces it suddenly becomes very quiet. TNO Delft confirms that the structures reduce noise by two to three decibels (out of an overall target of 10dB over the entire area between the Polderbaan and Hoofddorp): a significant contribution. De Kort calls the ridges ‘thresholds of silence’, and his vision is an exciting and ingenious ‘rising and falling wander-landscape. We are going to call the sheltered spots between the ridges “chambers”, where people can hide themselves away, as it were, in the seclusion of the new, undulating landscape.’ In this parkland with its earthen ridges, the sight lines create a fascinating experience of space and perspective. The long ridges, rising to approximately eye level, draw one in. This design transforms the area into a work of art that de Kort titles Groundsound. In the final phase, two ridges will by topped by pieces of art that de Kort calls Listening Ear, parabolic dishes large enough to stand in. At the focal point of the parabola the ambient noise is amplified as if you were cupping your hand around your ear, and de Kort says, ‘In this way, I want to give form to the meaning of sound and sound waves. They become visible, as it were, in the giant dishes.’
Thresholds of Silence
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The project embraces other landmarks in the vicinity of the airport, including a 10km (6.2 mi.) dyke and a former fortress converted into a gallery. In this way, new possibilities for culture and recreation will be created in the immediate proximity of the airport, giving Buitenschot Landscape Art Park potential to achieve international appeal. Support for the project, however, has not been universal. A few house owners on the edge of the area objected, and the farmers in the area next to the Polderbaan also lodged a complaint against the plans. Standing here amidst all these landscapers and earthmovers, we are joined by a
Construction of Buitenschot Landscape Art Park began in summer 2012 and is planned to be completed by the end of 2013, when it will be opened to the
man who farms the area around the Polderbaan. He tells us that he has lost precious arable land because the steep slope is almost impossible to mow, useable now only as a sheep pasture. Still, opponents have at least admitted that the thresholds of silence constitute a project that is unique in all the world. ‘There is a chance,’ says de Kort, ‘that this idea is interesting for exporting abroad to the surrounding areas of airports with similar problems.’ In the meantime, a unique alliance has been created between land and landscape, art and technology, commercial and civic interests, sound and silence. ☐
public. The project transforms the area around the airport into a giant sculpture that reduces ground noise and provides a venue for recreational and cultural
activities. Artist impression by H+N+S Landscape Architects.
Ed van Hinte is a writer and design researcher at DRS22 in The Hague, Netherlands. He focuses on lightweight structures and loves complex design procedures. Airplanes are where his interests meet.
PanAm, Boeing’s most important customer at the time the 747 was being developed, pressed for a passenger plane more than twice the size of the previous model (707). Boeing agreed to deliver twenty five 747s by the end of 1969, a breakneck schedule which allowed just 28 months to complete the design process. Photo courtesy of the Boeing Company.
THE UNEXPECTED SUCCESS OF THE BOEING 747
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The 747, the product of a complex, demanding collaborative design process, became an icon of the modern age, much to Boeing’s surprise.
Ask anyone to name the first type of airplane that springs to mind, and the answer is likely to be the Boeing 747 jumbo jet. From 1970 until the 2007 introduction of Airbus’ A380, it was the largest passenger carrier ever, and the remarkable image of its bulky head has become part of our cultural consciousness. It may come as a surprise that this unique shape was not a design choice, but rather the by-product of an extremely complicated development process that involved gruelling effort, interminable paperwork, vehement debate and little attention to visual values. Passenger airplanes are extraordinary machines. They are a crucial element in a worldwide system that transfers millions of people safely and efficiently through thin, icy air over vast distances in a very short time. Day in, day out, they fly higher than the highest mountain ranges and move faster than any other means of public transportation. Yet there are surprisingly few of them: the total world fleet of all passenger airplanes presently amounts to 25,000 at the most, including almost 1,500 Boeing 747s. For comparison, over the past year 800,000 cars were sold in Beijing alone. Even a large airline such as British Airways typically operates fewer than 250 planes (a quarter of which are 747s) that make an astonishing total of 200,000 flights a year. The birth of the Boeing 747 in the late 1960s heralded modern intercontinental mass transportation. It represents not only the impressive result of an intensive engineering and design process, but also the spirit of its era, a time when belief in progress, including access to air travel, was a phenomenal force. So much so that corporations and governments alike began to dream out loud about supersonic travel, about moving more people across the earth through sheer speed: more flights per day rather than more passengers per plane. Boeing wanted a piece of that prospective market too and launched a government-supported project to develop the 2707 SST, an aircraft planned to carry 300 passengers at three times the
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speed of sound. (By comparison the now obsolete AérospatialeBAC Concorde flew 100 passengers at twice the speed of sound.) The company considered the 747 a less-important intermediate product: something for the lower-end subsonic market. They expected to sell a couple of hundred units or so and projected that it would find more use as a container-carrying freight plane. It had to be developed within 28 months, which was 30% faster than usual even for a normal-sized jet, let alone an entirely new flying colossus. While the 747 was still in development, however, the government cancelled the SST programme, finding it neither cost-effective nor fuel-efficient. While it still existed the SST programme drained valuable resources, leaving Joseph Sutter, engineering chief of the 747 project, grappling with a lack of company support. Nevertheless, he and his 4,500-member engineering department set out to develop a very large airplane suitable for both freight and passengers. This group in turn became the core of the 747 programme led by Malcolm Stamper, involving a staggering total of 50,000 people committed to developing the market, negotiating financing, training pilots, and safety testing each and every component. Furthermore, PanAm Airlines, as Boeing’s most important customer, also exerted an unprecedented influence on the design process. In his autobiography 747: Creating the World’s First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation, Sutter relates how he had to negotiate some pitched battles during the design process. Many, if not most of them, concerned weight reduction, how to balance the systems and components essential to safe, comfortable flight with the profit-eating expense of transporting their combined weight. Every aspect of the plane’s design was the subject of intense discussion within an extensive community of people representing different interests, objectives and opinions. No doubt one of the most heated debates concerned the basic shape of the fuselage. The general belief, one shared by many of Sutter’s personnel as well as by PanAm CEO Juan Trippe, was that the design process would inevitably produce a double-decker craft: a tall, narrow airplane with two floors. This was mainly due to cues taken from ship design and the general idea that the passenger airplane was a flying ocean liner. Words like ‘crew’, ‘captain’ and ‘purser’ still bear witness to this association. Giant passenger ships are made larger by adding decks, and indeed this was the idea that Sutter started with, but as he continued to draft and design this model it began to present problems. In freight applications, for example, the height of the fuselage would make it difficult to load and unload containers. In passenger applications, the height of the upper cabin would make completing an emergency evacuation within the required 90 seconds dangerous, if not impossible. Searching for alternatives, Sutter and his payload engineer Milton Heinemann started to think along ‘heretical lines’ as they put it, developing the idea of a wider, double-aisle fuselage. They started to explore this novel concept
The latest version of the aircraft, the 747-8, is in production at the Boeing Everett Factory. This variant has a maximum payload capacity of
154 tons of cargo (16 percent bigger than its predecessor), allowing it to carry seven additional containers. Its body is more than twice as long
as the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk. Photo courtesy of the Boeing Company.
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Boeing 747
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The Boeing 707 (predecessor to the 747) could carry up to 219 passengers. The first Boeing 747 could carry up to 550 passengers. The newest 747 can carry up to 605 passengers.
Top: The historic Everett Factory. In 1966, having signed a US$525 million contract with PanAm, Boeing purchased 780 acres of land in Everett, Washington, 30 miles north of Seattle. No existing facility could accommodate the 747’s unprecedented size, so to build the world’s largest airplane, Boeing had to build the world’s largest factory. With a floor area of 398,000m² (4.3 million sq. ft) and a volume of 13,385,378m³ (472 million cu. ft), the Boeing Everett Factory is still the largest building in the world. Photo courtesy of the Boeing Company. Bottom: Boeing 747, interior mockup. A full-scale mock-up of the interior of the 747’s passenger model. Boeing initially expected to sell only about four hundred 747 passenger planes and designed them for easy conversion into cargo carriers. When the passenger seats are removed the fuselage can accommodate containers stacked two units wide, two units high and two or three ranks deep. Boeing has since sold more than one and a half thousand 747s. Photo courtesy of the Boeing Company.
and discovered that although it might be somewhat heavier, the spacious cabin would be much more comfortable for passengers. And loading freight into such a wide body would be much easier. The cockpit would sit above the front loading door in the nose, trailed by a fairing, a curved surface to reduce drag, creating a modest extra deck and the 747’s characteristic bulge. The engineers realised that they would have to work hard to convince double-decker believers to accept this radical departure from the traditional approach, and that it was possible that after the first rumours of the wide-body solution started to circulate, Sutter could suddenly find himself replaced by someone willing to pursue the double-decker concept. Fortunately, by that time he had gained sufficient authority to weather that conflict. With Boeing finally more or less behind him, the next, even more crucial, step was to gain the support of Juan Trippe. A meeting in New York with PanAm representatives was arranged for this purpose, and Heinemann, more diplomatic and less explosive than Sutter, was chosen to present the new concept. Heinemann went about it cleverly, reserving a conference room 6m wide, exactly the width of the proposed cabin design, so that the executives present could experience it directly. He let the space speak for itself, and it was a convincing argument. Before a final decision could be made, however, there had to be one more meeting at the Everett facility where PanAm representatives could compare full-scale mock-ups of the double-decker and wide-body models. When Trippe enquired about the space inside the fairing atop the wide-body fuselage, Sutter replied that it could be used by the crew as a place to sleep or relax. When Trippe disagreed, saying that the space would be used for passengers, Sutter realised that his wide-body concept had won. But he probably still didn’t realise that his design would become an icon of the airline industry for decades to come. ☐
Jessica Hilltout, a nomadic, Belgian-born photographer, loaded sacks of deflated soccer balls onto the roof of a 1976 Volkswagen Beetle and began a seven-month road trip across Africa to document the continent’s love of the game.
GRASSROOTS FOOTBALL
Top: Jamie’s Ball Manjacaze, Mozambique
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Right: Stocking Ball Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa This is a ball made by a mother for her son. She told me that she stuffed the inside with whatever she could find and wrapped the outside with an old stocking.
Yarn Ball Gondola, Mozambique There are many different techniques for making balls, and they depend primarily on the locally available materials. This ball plays like a real football. It’s perfectly round and bounces. This is because
in the centre is an inflated condom which is then wrapped with plastic bags or old fabric to protect it from punctures. Then many metres of yarn are wound around it. It has a life span of about three days before it deflates.
Domingo’s Ball Chicome, Mozambique Chicome is a little village far from everything. There is no road leading there, just sandy trails through the bush. The village has no running water or electricity, and life there revolves around farming and
football. Every day at 4pm the boys gather on the pitch where, thanks to a ball, life is magically transformed for an hour or so. Every young boy in this village has his own handmade football. As there are no shops in the village, there is very little rubbish, so children make footballs out of whatever materials they can find.
This ball is made from an old rice bag and seedling bag bound together. Sometimes they even play matches against neighbouring villages. This takes three days: one day to walk the 25km (15.5 mi.) to the match, one day to play, and one day to walk back.
Anokye Stars FC Ball Kumasi, Ghana This ball belongs to a wonderful club run by Sani Pollux. He is a perfect example of a person who manages to do so much with so little. He has devoted his life to training kids from the street; so far about 150 boys have passed through his club, many of
them very talented. When I first met Sani, I spent the afternoon photographing the footballs they use to train. Each ball was unique, worn down in its own way. Each ball was hanging onto life for the sake of this little club. It was then that I realised that there were two ways of looking at these balls. Either you pitied them, and thought how terrible it was that people
have nothing better to play with. Or you looked at them as positive proof of the strength of the human spirit.
Anonymous Ball Tôlanaro, Madagascar I know little about this ball. It is one of the many balls I photographed in Madagascar before I started working with balls more systematically. This image led me to the idea of AMEN — Grassroots Football, a book made in collaboration with my father.
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Rob Cameron is originally from London but has spent the last 20 years living in the Czech Republic, and now covers the region for the BBC and others. As a journalist he’s always intrigued and often delighted by local oddities of all kinds, so a tunnel to the Adriatic instantly piqued his curiosity.
TUNNEL TO THE OTHER SIDE A tunnel to Yugoslavia would have simplified the trip from landlocked Czechoslovakia to the sea… …if Cold War politics hadn’t interfered. In the late 1970s, as the third decade of the Cold War was drawing to a close, communist Czechoslovakia came up with a remarkable proposal: a 410km (254.8 mi.) railway tunnel under the Alps, linking the Czech city of České Budějovice with the Yugoslav port of Koper. However improbable it may seem, the governments of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy and Yugoslavia went so far as to open tentative discussions on the proposal. Then suddenly the project was shelved, and the idea was forgotten. The Czech Republic is a wonderful place; its verdant valleys are dotted with fairytale castles, and its perimeter is ringed by lush forests and lofty peaks. But a cursory glance at a map of Europe will reveal, even to the most geographically challenged, a single glaring shortcoming: it’s about as landlocked as you can get. For an economy driven primarily by export, that’s always been a problem. Barring a short-lived period in the 13th century when the medieval Kingdom of Bohemia stretched as far as modern-day Slovenia, the Czechs have never been able to ship their wares to
distant shores—or dip their toes in the foaming surf—without first undertaking an arduous overland journey. Enter Karel Žlábek, a Czech professor with a cunning plan: a railway tunnel that would stretch from Czechoslovakia to the shores of the Adriatic, 410km to the south. The greatest natural obstacle to trade and tourism between Central Europe and the Mediterranean would be overcome. ‘The north-south railway route exists. It’s been around for many years. It developed as a result of history,’ said Jiří Svoboda, of Praguebased engineering company Pragoprojekt. ‘But of course it’s always been blocked by the Alpine ranges that stand in its path. To get around them, trains and trucks have to take a number of complicated diversions. The aim has always been to create the shortest possible route to the sea because of the large number of goods and people that make this journey.’ Professor Žlábek created the shortest possible route of all: a railway tunnel running directly beneath the Alps.
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Upon examination of the blueprints—now carefully stored in the Pragoprojekt archives in the Prague district of Krč—it is immediately obvious that the professor’s idea was breathtakingly ambitious. High-speed freight and passenger trains would depart on a single-track line from České Budějovice, the southern Czech city known for its traditional Budvar beer. After traveling 6km (3.7 mi.) down a gentle slope the trains would enter the first of three tunnels, at 73km (45.4 mi.) the shortest of the project. The Czech end of the tunnel was in Soviet territory, but at the 43km (26.7 mi.) mark the train would slip under the Iron Curtain and enter Austria, emerging 30km (18.6 mi.) later into the sun-dappled Danube valley and stopping just east of Linz. Here, Austrian freight wagons and
passenger carriages would be coupled to the electric locomotives. West German consumer goods bound for freighters in the Mediterranean would also be loaded here, having been shipped down the Danube. After Linz the line would become doubletrack, and the trains would embark on a slow 38km (23.6 mi.) climb to the longest of the tunnels, traveling 139km (86.4 mi.) under the mighty Styrian and Carinthian Alps. They would briefly emerge into the daylight again in order to cross the Wörthersee, an Alpine lake west of Klagenfurt. After rattling over suspension bridges for 11km (6.8 mi.) the trains would disappear into the final tunnel, whose 132km (82.0 mi.) would bring them into what was then Yugoslavia,
⑥ ⑧ ①
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Top: Station Cross-section ① train tunnels ② service tunnel ③ access hallway ④ service tunnel groundwater drainage ⑤ station groundwater drainage ⑥ access shaft
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lift shaft station and track section technical systems track section groundwater sump service platforms
Bottom: Tunnel Cross-section ① train tunnels ② service tunnel ③ technical systems ④ track section groundwater drainage ⑤ access hallway ⑥ train tunnel groundwater drainage
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Top: Dhondiba Medge, the first chairman of Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust of Mumbai, a dabbawalla cooperative which launched in 1954. His son, Raghunath Medge, is the current
chairman of the trust. Photo: Meena Kadri, taken from a framed image at the dabbawalla hub point near Grant Rd. Station, Mumbai
Technical diagram of the tunnel project showing:
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side view of the entire tunnel at a vertical scale of 1:20,000 and horizontal scale of 1:800,000 (reproduced here at roughly 50%)
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countries (top bar) and regions (bottom bar) through which the tunnel would pass
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identification of key points along the route (tunnel entrances, state borders, ventilation shafts, etc.)
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locations of maintenance stations at the surface (open circle) and inside the tunnel (solid circle)
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elevations of the features identified in ② and ③
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lengths of individual track sections
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slopes of individual track sections
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track orientation
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names of maintenance stations
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an overhead view of the entire tunnel from north to south (The S on the compass rosa stands for ‘sever’, Czech for ‘north’.)
Images courtesy of Pragoprojekt.
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WTW #2
‘Perhaps it sounds like utopia today, but from a technical standpoint the whole project is really viable. In some ways it was perhaps even ahead of its time.’ — Jiří Svoboda
where they would travel the final 12km (7.5 mi.) overland stretch. Here the line would perform a tight dogleg turn, skirting the Italian port of Trieste before finally arriving in Koper, in what is today Slovenia. It would have been a truly international project, an underground railway leading from communist Czechoslovakia, in the heart of the Soviet bloc, all the way to socialist, non-aligned Yugoslavia, having stopped in neutral, capitalist Austria on the way. Little wonder, perhaps, that it was never built, given the political circumstances of the time and Moscow’s stranglehold over Eastern Europe. And yet… From a purely technical standpoint, the idea is not as insane as it sounds. Professor Žlábek’s dream was certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. Building such tunnels is not impossible or even terribly difficult. Svoboda suggested that perhaps today five shorter tunnels would be built instead of three longer ones. ‘The Swiss are currently building a 57km (35.4 mi.) tunnel, the Gotthard Base Tunnel, and are planning several others,’ he told me. ‘I’ve heard the French and Italians are starting a new TGV tunnel as well, which will be of a similar length.’ Slightly more fanciful was Žlábek’s pièce de résistance, a Czechoslovak seaport called Adriaport. The soil from the tunnel excavation work would be piled into the waves just west of Koper to create an artificial island. The island would serve as a freight terminal, becoming Czechoslovak territory after the requisite bilateral agreement with Yugoslavia had been signed. At Adriaport goods would be unloaded and transferred to waiting freight ships. Meanwhile, Czechoslovaks, Austrians and other tourists, after a comfortable two-hour rail journey, would be reunited with their vehicles, which had travelled behind them on railway carriages. They could be on the beaches of Croatia by lunchtime, in Dubrovnik for dinner. Or perhaps join the
autostrada at Trieste—just up the road from Koper—and speed off into the Italian sun. Oddly, the official documentation contains no mention of security concerns; in 1979 foreign travel for average citizens of communist Czechoslovakia was a distant dream involving an endless round of permits from their employers, their local Party official and the police before they could apply for the much-sought-after (and frequently denied) permit to leave the country and exchange Czechoslovak crowns for Yugoslav dinars or Italian lira. All this, plus the trouble and expense of obtaining visas to enter those countries. How would the tunnel be secured to stop Czechoslovak tourists making a run for it at Linz, instead of spending their requisite two weeks on the beach in Yugoslavia before dutifully heading back home to the workers’ paradise? Of this, there is no word. But let’s imagine for a moment that the political and security difficulties could have been overcome. Certainly it would have been a far more pleasant journey than the hours Czech tourists currently spend sitting in traffic jams on the Austrian and Croatian motorways, or the 20 hours the Adriatic Express takes to cover the 1,000km from Prague to Split by rail. Not to mention the achingly slow car journey to Italy. Svoboda points out that design-wise, the tunnel was far ahead of its time: the professor envisioned twin tunnels connected by a service tunnel with regular shafts for ventilation and emergency access. Today’s modern railway tunnels are built in almost precisely the same way. Žlábek was also something of a visionary environmentalist; the tunnel was about as green as you can get. ‘His fundamental philosophy was to use the railways and put cars and freight on trains,’ Svoboda said. ‘He was absolutely opposed to building road tunnels, even though road transport and the motorways were really taking
Tunnel to the Other Side
off at the time. He wanted to get passenger cars and freight containers onto the railways for long journeys.’ To say the professor was committed to his project is something of an understatement. According to the original 1979 documents kept in the Pragoprojekt archives, Professor Žlábek first began toying with the idea of an underground railway to the Adriatic in 1944, in the closing months of the war. The first written mention of the tunnel came three years later in 1947, in Žlábek’s study of the future of economic relations between Czechoslovakia and Germany, commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But it wasn’t until 1975, after years of effort, that Professor Žlábek was finally invited to submit a full blueprint to Czechoslovakia’s communist government. Pragoprojekt, then a state company, was put in charge of overseeing the plans. As Pragoprojekt’s draftsmen laboured away on the blueprints, Žlábek campaigned tirelessly for the idea, lobbying politicians and diplomats, communists and capitalists, at one point even gaining the ear of the president of Austria. He lectured at universities and appeared on radio and television, tantalising the public on both sides of the Iron Curtain with the notion of a railway tunnel to the sea. In 1978 and 1979, the plans were revised, and—astonishingly—the first tentative inter-governmental meetings were held between communist Czechoslovakia, neutral Austria, capitalist Italy and socialist Yugoslavia. Then, suddenly, the idea was shelved. When Professor Žlábek died in 1984, it was clear his dream would never become reality. At least not in the 20th century. Even without the political concerns, it would, of course, have been astronomically expensive. The original 1979 study estimated the total cost at some 258 billion Czechoslovak crowns. Adjusted for inflation, today that figure would be the equivalent of some three trillion Czech
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crowns or €177 billion (roughly the cost of saving Greece from bankruptcy). It would also have taken about 30 years to finish. So if the four countries involved had signed a memorandum in 1979 and begun tunnelling, say, four years later, they’d be cutting the ribbon round about now. The decisive factor, however, was Cold War politics. While Professor Žlábek was showing plans to the Austrian president and having lunch with the Italian ambassador, the apparatchiks of the Czechoslovak Communist Party—always with one eye on the mood in Moscow—were shifting nervously in their seats. ‘The Russians certainly knew about it, and in the beginning they were actually in favour, but as soon as it began looking like the Czechs and Austrians and Italians and Yugoslavs were actually getting close to agreement, they said, “stop”. And Prague stopped,’ said Svoboda, not without a note of bitterness in his voice. ‘That’s the way things were in Czechoslovakia back then. If someone here had a good idea, then sooner or later it would be “Russified” by Big Brother in Moscow. They were afraid of competition. They always wanted to be first.’ Martin Vaněk, the student whose 2008 dissertation on high-speed railway routes beneath the Alps reignited media interest in Professor Žlábek’s tunnel, was rather more prosaic. ‘If you want my opinion, it was a totally unrealistic project then and it’s totally unrealistic now. It was very much an idea of its time, and proposed in totally different political-economic circumstances,’ he told me. Vaněk’s brief chapter on the tunnel in his dissertation for the Faculty of Transportation Sciences of the Czech Technical University in Prague ends with the following memorable words: ‘The study itself ended up filed away somewhere, perhaps partly out of fear of having to explain to the Kremlin where we wanted to go with that tunnel through Western Europe.’ ☐
THE BOX THAT SHRANK THE WORLD The lowly, inelegant container has been the key to a revolution that continues to shape the everyday lives of nearly everyone in the world.
Marc Levinson is author of The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, published by Princeton University Press.
The containership Maersk Dieppe approaches Hong Kong’s Kwai Tsing Container Terminals, the thirdbusiest container port in the world. Today there are approximately seventeen million containers of various sizes in use worldwide. Photo: Lam Yik Fei / Bloomberg
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The shipping container is a squat box of welded steel that has devastated some markets and professions while giving rise to new opportunities both just around the corner and half a world away.
There is, let it be said, nothing remotely sexy about a shipping container. Six sheets of steel welded into a box with boards for a floor and a couple of doors at one end: transportation equipment doesn’t get any more basic. Yet since the first modern container voyage in April 1956, the container has helped transform the world economy. By dramatically lowering the cost of shipping goods, the container made possible a vast expansion of international trade. It destroyed the economies of ports from Liverpool to Brooklyn and gave rise to entirely new ones. It eliminated millions of jobs on the waterfront and reshaped the very nature of manufacturing. It enabled China to emerge as a world power. Without the container, there would be no globalisation.
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Before the container, trade across the oceans involved an arduous process called break-bulk shipping: each time cargo had to be shifted from one mode of transport to another—from a railway wagon to a lorry, or from a lorry to an oceangoing vessel—the bulk shipment had to be broken up and each item handled individually. This was far from simple. When the merchant vessel SS Warrior sailed from the United States to Germany in 1954, it carried 194,582 separate bags, barrels, wooden crates and paperboard cartons. In Brooklyn every single item had to be moved from a truck or train into a warehouse near the dock, taken from the warehouse and lowered into the ship’s hold, and then manhandled into position so that it would not shift in heavy seas. Upon arrival in Bremerhaven the process was reversed: dock workers manoeuvred each of those 194,582 items to the opening beneath the hatch, hoisted them from the hold onto the dock, hauled them from the dock to a nearby warehouse, and then painstakingly placed each piece of cargo aboard a lorry or a freight wagon. Although the transatlantic voyage took only ten and a half days, some of the cargo spent more than three months in transit. Loading and unloading the ship accounted for more than onethird of the total cost of the voyage. All that loading and unloading meant that break-bulk shipping was a very labour-intensive business. New York and London, the world’s two largest ports, each had more than 50,000 registered dockworkers in the early 1950s. On one day the urgent need to unload perishable cargo could create jobs for all comers. The next day there might be no work at all. A port needed a big labour supply to handle the peaks, but on the average day the demand for workers was much smaller, and dockers had to beg for jobs each morning in a humiliating selection process. The constant risk that there would be no work tomorrow shaped tightknit communities built around the docks, where generations of fathers and sons had earned their living by loading ships. The dockers’ unions were reflexively opposed to automation because they knew that substituting machines for muscle-power would eliminate dockworkers’ jobs. The cumbersome process of moving freight made international trade very expensive. On average, freight charges accounted for 10–30%
The Box that Shrank the World
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The driving force of the worldwide container revolution was Malcom P. McLean, a shipping magnate who had started out driving a single truck in a small town in rural North Carolina during the Great Depression.
of the cost of imported goods. Insurance was costly as well because cargo was frequently damaged or stolen en route. While American factories exported machinery and French vineyards exported fine wines, sending goods across the ocean was so costly that inexpensive products were not worth trading. French women wore skirts and blouses made in the Sentier district of Paris. American women wore skirts and blouses made in the high-rise lofts of the Garment
Top: Traditional break-bulk shipping involved unloading thousands of individual packages from trains or lorries at port and transferring
District in New York City. Only the highestquality garments were traded internationally because the high cost of shipping was a barrier to trade, raising the price of imports and thus protecting domestic manufacturers everywhere from foreign competition. Viewed from the 21st century, the solution to the problem of high freight costs seems trivial: instead of loading hundreds of thousands of separate items aboard a ship, why not pack the individual crates and cartons into big boxes and put the boxes on the ship? This was not a new idea in the 1950s. Canal boats had carried wooden cargo containers in the 18th century, and railways and ship lines in Europe, Australia and America had transported steel containers since the 1920s. The trouble was that those containers did not lower the cost of shipping freight. They usually made a single oneway trip and then were broken up or abandoned, because at the destination there was no easy way to find a shipper with freight headed back
them one by one to a ship (and vice versa). In 1956 American entrepreneur Malcom McLean began loading whole containers onto ships,
reducing shipping costs to less than 3% of the break-bulk price. Photo courtesy of Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Unloading of merchandise at the Handelskade in Willemstad, Curaรงao. Although the ocean voyage took only ten days, some of the cargo spent
more than three months in transit. Loading and unloading the ship accounted for more than one-third of the total shipping costs.
Photo courtesy of Tropenmuseum Amsterdam.
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to the container’s point of origin. Nor was there much saving of labour costs: to load one of those early containers aboard a ship, a worker on the dock had to prop a ladder against the side, climb atop the container, attach a hook to the steel eye in each corner, and climb down again; after a winch lowered the container into the hold, other dockers would have to climb atop it, remove the hooks, climb back down, and then shove the metal box into place alongside all the barrels and bales and crates. Containers were a nuisance to handle and left wasted space in the ship’s interior. ‘Cargo containers have been more of a hindrance than a help,’ a leading steamship executive complained in 1955. The solution to this conundrum came from a man who knew nothing about ships. Malcom P. McLean, born in 1913 in a small town in North Carolina, in the United States, was a trucker by profession and an entrepreneur by inclination. Starting with a single truck in the depths of the Great Depression, McLean had built one of the largest road haulage companies in the country. His trucks operated mainly in the north-eastern part of the United States, from North Carolina to Boston. There were few motorways in the early 1950s, and McLean grew increasingly concerned that highway congestion would delay his trucks. In 1953 he came up with the idea of buying ships to ferry truck trailers up and down the Atlantic coast. But after acquiring two ship lines, McLean realised there was a better way. Instead of carrying truck trailers, McLean’s ships would carry only the trailer bodies, leaving the chassis and wheels behind. The wheels would waste precious shipboard space, whereas trailer bodies could easily be stacked, allowing many more of them to fit on a single vessel. McLean bought two well-used tankers and installed steel frames to hold containers above the deck. On April 26, 1956 a crane in Newark, New Jersey, just across the harbour from New York City, lifted 58 aluminium truck bodies aboard the SS Ideal X. Five days later, the ship steamed into Houston, Texas where 58 trucks took on the metal boxes and hauled them to their destinations. When McLean’s accountants ran the numbers, they pegged the cost of loading the SS Ideal X at 15.8¢ per ton, a tiny fraction of the US$5.83 it cost to load one ton of freight aboard an average break-bulk ship. Unlike previous
WTW #2
efforts, Malcom McLean’s version of containerisation saved money. Yet containerisation did not take the world by storm. On the contrary, it met with intense opposition. Railways, road hauliers and ship lines all feared that the container would make their business plans obsolete and force them to invest in expensive new equipment. Dockers’ unions from Australia to Venezuela protested that the new technology would eliminate their members’ jobs, often walking out on strike when a containership called. Transportation regulators blocked efforts to pass the savings from containerisation on to shippers by insisting that freight rates be based on the commodity inside each container, even though a railway or trucking company faced the same cost to transport a container of furniture as a container of cigarettes. Traditional ports such as New York, London and San Francisco tried desperately to preserve break-bulk shipping because their old-fashioned piers and narrow streets were illsuited to handle containers. Shippers, meanwhile, were facing a jumble. Following the SS Ideal X ’s first voyage, many major ship lines and railways had developed their own containers. Some were 17 feet (5.18m) long, some 28 feet (8.53m), some 35 feet (10.67m). The vast majority of the 58,000 privately owned containers in the United States in 1959, however, were less than 8 feet (2.44m) long. This variety threatened to nip containerisation in the bud. If one transportation company’s containers would not fit on another’s ships or railway carriages, each would need a vast fleet of containers exclusively for its own customers. A European railway container could not cross the Atlantic, because US trucks and railroads could not accommodate European sizes, and a container owned by the New York Central Railroad could not readily be transferred to the Missouri Pacific. Looking ahead, each ship line would need its own cranes in every port, no matter how small its business or how infrequent its ships’ visits, because other companies’ equipment would not be able to handle its boxes. It took years of painful negotiations before major ship lines agreed on a standard container, a box 40 feet (12.19m) long and 8 feet (2.44m) wide, with a standard steel fitting in each corner so it could be lifted by any crane anywhere.
The Box that Shrank the World
Top: Although he started with a single pickup truck in 1934, McLean had the second-largest US trucking company (McLean Trucking Co.) by the late 1950s, and had also acquired the Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company. Image courtesy of Garry Nelson.
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Bottom: In 1956 McLean bought two World War II T-2 tankers, which he converted into containerships. Renamed the SS Ideal X, this ship carried 58 containers from Newark, NJ to Houston, TX on its first voyage on 26 April, 1956. The ship remained
in operation for nine more years and was eventually scrapped in Japan. Image: Karsten Kunibert
A 40-foot (12.19m) intermodal container. All eight corners of this steel box have twistlock fittings for stacking, locking and craning. Container sizes have been standardised
since 1961 so that containers can be transported efficiently by ship, rail and lorry, saving space, expense and time. Photo courtesy of European Container Terminals.
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The standardised container has revolutionised not only shipping, but manufacturing and international trade. It has changed the design of ships, waterways, ports and factories.
Once the standard was set, container shipping boomed. During a few short weeks in the summer of 1965, shipowners in the United States and Europe announced no fewer than 26 projects to convert break-bulk ships into containerships. The first containerships crossed the Atlantic in 1966, doing a brisk trade in Scotch whisky and the household goods of US soldiers stationed in Germany. The cost savings were so staggering that within three years almost all trade across the North Atlantic was moving in containerships. Two years later, the story repeated itself in Japan. As new containership services linked Japan and California, the impact on trade flows was immediate. Japanese seaborne exports, 27.1 million metric tons in 1967, soared to
WTW #2
40.6 million tons in 1969, the first full year of container service across the Pacific. The value of Japanese exports to the United States leapt 21% in 1969 alone as Japanese televisions and cameras flooded into America. Containers reached Hong Kong in 1969, Singapore in 1972. Again, trade soared as a story similar to Japan’s was repeated along the Pacific Rim. Korean exports to the United States trebled between 1969 and 1973 as lower shipping costs made Korean textiles and clothing competitive in the US market. The value of Hong Kong’s foreign trade rose 35% between 1970 and 1972. Taiwan’s exports trebled in three years, and its imports doubled. The combination of ever-larger ships at sea and new enthusiasm from railways and truck lines, which were reshaping their businesses to handle containers efficiently on land, brought faster service and lower costs not just from port to port, but between inland points half a world away. Cheaper freight brought a boom in trade of a sort previously unknown. Inexpensive Australian wines, Brazilian shoes, and Malaysian shirts found their way onto store shelves in Europe and North America. Salmon farming developed into a major industry in Chile, thanks to refrigerated containers that made it possible to ship the fish to consumers thousands of kilometres away. Eating strawberries and mangos in the middle of winter, unthinkable before the 1970s, became routine thanks to container freight. In 1986, when China decided to open its economy to foreign investment, its strategy of producing low-value manufactured goods was predicated on the availability of low-cost containership service. Exporting cotton socks, wind-up alarm clocks and tiny replicas of the Eiffel Tower to North America and Europe was practical only because shipping the goods cost next to nothing. The Chinese government understood the importance of cheap freight, investing massively to build and expand container ports. In 1990, Hong Kong, then under British control, was the only Chinese port ranked among the world’s leaders. By 2011, six of the world’s eight largest container ports were located in China, and millions of manufacturing workers in other countries had lost their jobs in plants that could not compete with Chinese factories.
The Box that Shrank the World
The container changed not just where things were produced, but how they were produced. The pre-container era was marked by vast integrated factories. At the most famous of these, Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant near Detroit, raw materials like rubber, sand and iron ore arrived at one end and were made into the gaskets, windscreens and engine blocks that the Rouge assembled into finished automobiles. Such huge plants made sense when transport costs were high because they eliminated the need to ship parts and components around the country. But with containerisation, manufacturers no longer needed to have factories that did everything. Large integrated plants were replaced by small ones that specialised in particular products such as synthetic resins or ball bearings and sent their output to other factories for further processing. These supply chains gradually stretched across oceans. By the 1990s, finished consumer goods such as shoes and television sets filled less than a third of the containers arriving at ports such as Los Angeles. Most of the incoming containers held factory inputs from Asia intended for further processing in the United States. Freight rates were low enough that it even made sense to export American waste paper to China for recycling. The container transformed shopping too, as retailers discovered that they could cut out the wholesalers that had stood between manufacturers and consumers. With modern communications and container shipping, a clothing chain in Britain could design a dress and transmit the pattern to a factory in Bangladesh which could use local labour to sew Chinese fabric made from American cotton and add Indonesian buttons made from Taiwanese plastics. The finished order, loaded into a 40-foot container, could reach shoppers on Oxford Street in less than a month at prices far lower than any domestic manufacturer could offer. Globalisation, while vital to the growth of developing countries, has been controversial in rich ones. Most frequently the Asian manufacturing boom is attributed to low wages and oppressive working conditions that enable Asian factories to undercut competitors in wealthier countries. But if low labour costs were the decisive factor, manufacturers would have shifted
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production to China and South East Asia decades ago. It took the container to make globalisation possible by reducing the high transport costs that were such an impediment to trade. The container revolution is not over. Ships continue to get larger; the latest can carry 9,000 40-foot containers, more than 150 times the capacity of the SS Ideal X. The Panama Canal, that key artery between the Atlantic and the Pacific, is in the midst of a US$5.25 billion expansion to handle bigger ships, but when that project is completed in 2015, dozens of the newest containerships will still be too wide to pass through. Ports are getting larger, too. Europe’s largest ports, Rotterdam and Antwerp, are undertaking huge new investments to move the thousands of containers that will need to be offand on-loaded each time one of the giant new vessels calls. Cranes are getting taller—the newest stand over 130m (426.5 ft) high—and faster, with some able to move a container from ship to shore every 90 seconds. And around the docks, where the containers move like clockwork, people are becoming ever scarcer. The most modern container terminals use computer-controlled stacker cranes to pluck containers from incoming trucks and deposit them in a specified storage location where driverless vehicles pick them up and move them from the storage area to the pier. Dockworkers are less likely to be found near a ship than in nearby offices, where they use computers to plan the most efficient way to load vessels, and write programs that tell the automated vehicles what to do. Meanwhile, the great lessons of the container revolution—that standardisation and scale are the keys to lower costs and higher profits— have been absorbed by entrepreneurs who have never set foot on a wharf. Computer companies have created data centres in a box, ready to deploy in an instant. Architects are designing apartment houses and shopping centres assembled from containers. Oil companies are using the concepts of containerisation to design modular pipelines that are easy to assemble. A portable art gallery in a container may be coming soon to a neighbourhood near you. Nearly six decades after the famous voyage of the SS Ideal X, the container continues to change the way the world works. ☐
CHUNGKING MANSIONS — THE WORLD INSIDE THE BUILDING Gordon Mathews is a professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, teaching Meanings of Life, amongst other subjects. He spends his free time hanging out at Chungking Mansions. Paul Hilton usually photographs wildlife, but for this assignment he returned to Chungking Mansions, where he had stayed when on his first trip to Hong Kong.
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One building in Hong Kong houses a diverse international community that has a major impact on trade all over Africa and Asia.
Chungking Mansions is a dilapidated 17-storey building at the heart of Hong Kong’s tourist district. Thousands of people of any of the 129 different nationalities recorded in the guesthouse logs stay in the guesthouses on any given night. The building’s already dodgy reputation was immortalised in Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 movie Chungking Express. While to an outsider the building may seem a dangerous ghetto, for the insider it is a shot at prosperity. Here one can find Pakistani merchants, African buyers, American hippies; Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims; tiny hotel rooms, money-changing stalls, curry stands, internet cafés, snack bars, barber shops, laundries, computer repair services, prostitutes; stores selling mobile phones, clothing, shoes and
watches; a constantly changing kaleidoscope of business and cultural interchange. Perhaps the only thing that seems to be lacking is native Hong Kongers. Anthropologist Gordon Mathews started researching the building in 2006, staying in all 90 of its guesthouses, spending every available moment there in an effort to answer questions like ‘What has brought all these different people here?’ and ‘Why does this place exist?’ His research culminated in his book Ghetto at the Centre of the World. Peter Biľak spoke to Mathews about how the Chungking Mansions traders do business and why they carry their goods in their suitcases instead of shipping them in containers: in short, about how most of the world experiences globalisation today.
Chungking Mansions is a building providing some of the cheapest accommodation in Hong Kong and functioning as a gathering place
for ethnic minorities. In addition to the guesthouses, there are also hundreds of stores, restaurants and exchange offices.
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Peter Biľak: Hong Kong ranks amongst the most globalised economies of the world. Why Hong Kong? What makes it so particularly suited to being the centre of globalisation, and what does this mean for the rest of us? Gordon Mathews: One thing about Hong Kong is that it always has been an open port, and that’s how it’s made its money. And so unlike many other societies that want to protect their citizens through immigration restrictions, Hong Kong has had much more of an open border. There are visa restrictions, of course, but Hong Kong has been different from other places in terms of allowing people in for business purposes. And this is particularly true when it comes to people from the developing world. When did you first hear about Chungking Mansions? I’ve known about Chungking Mansions for most of my adult life. The Lonely Planet guide came out when I was in my early twenties and it had statements like, ‘If you go to Hong Kong, the place to stay is Chungking Mansions’. And all the hippie travellers and backpackers of that era would stay in Chungking Mansions. Anybody with dreams of travel knew about Chungking Mansions back then. What inspired your deeper interest in the building? In the early 1980s when I first stayed there, I wasn’t very interested in the building. It was just a matter of needing to stay in a place where I could save my pennies. My anthropological interest came only much later. Being in a place like Hong Kong that is 94% Chinese and then seeing this building where there’re no Chinese, or very few Chinese, obviously piques a person’s interest, and I wondered what was going on here. Tell me about the history of the building. You mentioned the 1980s when it functioned mainly as a cheap hostel. Is it different now? No, it’s not changed a whole lot. When it was first built in 1961 it was said to be a rather luxurious place. I don’t know if that’s true because Hong Kong then was rather poor. But by the late 1960s it was already falling apart; there was prostitution going on there, among many other
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things. In the 1970s it became more a centre for backpackers passing through, and because the building hasn’t had a unified ownership scheme, there were 900 different owners, so anybody who wanted to take their apartment and make it into a guesthouse could. And lots of people did, so that in the 1970s and 1980s many small apartments became guesthouses. And that’s still the case today. The change that took place is that, beginning in the 1990s, there were fewer backpackers travelling through and many more developing-world traders; as China developed as a major manufacturer of goods, many people from Africa, Asia and South East Asia wanted to do business in China, and Chungking Mansions was the place to go as a base for that. And so the population of the building really did begin to shift then, but still it was the same basic structure of a lot of guesthouses, businesses on the ground and first floors, a lot of people from all over the world passing through—so fundamentally it hasn’t changed all that much. Hong Kong is known to have some of the most expensive real estate in the world. How can this building, which offers the cheapest hostels, cheapest restaurants and cheapest stores, survive there? That’s a huge and fascinating mystery. And it’s extremely important to understanding Chungking Mansions, because within 100 yards of Chungking Mansions you have two of the newest and most fashionable shopping centres in Hong Kong. Right across the street from Chungking Mansions is a Michelin-starred restaurant. There are a couple of reasons for this. The biggest reason is simply that Chungking Mansions’ property owners and managers can make money through volume, so if you’re running a guesthouse you don’t need to have high prices. If you have ten small rooms that are full every night, you can still make a lot of money even at relatively low prices, and so volume wins out. And if a given guesthouse owner raises prices, there will be fewer guests—it turns out that you lose money by raising prices. And I think the property managers of the building know that by keeping rents cheap you can keep profits high.
Chungking Mansions
In your book you write that there are some 4,000 people staying in the building at any given time. Who are they, and how do they manage to co-exist in the building? That’s always a difficult question. These people range from Chinese families, who have lived in Chungking Mansions for 20 or 30 years, to traders from Zaire or Kenya or Nigeria coming in for a week or two, to backpackers and tourists travelling from all over the place. It’s a whole vast array of people, and it’s always changing. During a Chinese holiday you might have huge numbers of Chinese in the building; at the time of the Canton Trade Fair or the Hong Kong Trade Fair you might have a huge surplus of traders. So the composition shifts from week to week and month to month. All the different languages that can be heard, it’s always quite staggering, just the sheer amount of diversity. These people of different nationalities, ethnic groups and religions get along because they all have the same interest: making more money than they could have made back home. This common interest enables people of different ethnicities and nationalities to co-exist with a degree of harmony. You spent quite some time in the building. Tell me about your time there and how people reacted to your research. I’m an anthropologist, and an anthropologist doesn’t do research by handing out a questionnaire survey; an anthropologist does research by hanging out. And what you do is go stay in a place and just spend as much time as you possibly can talking to shopkeepers, drinking beer with anybody who wants to talk, doing anything you possibly can to get to know people and their lives. And that’s what I did, and I probably have spent 150 to 180 nights in Chungking Mansions at the guesthouses. I still go there a couple of times a week, just hanging out and talking to people. It was a remarkably easy place to do research because people wanted to talk. I didn’t realise this until I had been there for a while, but basically, many of the shopkeepers in Chungking Mansions feel neglected by Hong Kong at large, and so just because somebody wanted to talk to them about business and life, many really enjoyed talking. I found that very fulfilling, how much people just wanted to talk.
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Low-end globalisation is the opposite of globalisation as set forth by the highend multinational companies: trade conducted by people carrying back 900 mobile phones in their 32kg luggage limit.
In your book you describe Chungking Mansions’ activities as ‘low-end globalisation’. Can you explain what that means? Low-end globalisation is the opposite of globalisation as set forth by the high-end multinational companies, which involves batteries of lawyers and multimillion-dollar advertising budgets. In Chungking Mansions’ trade, you don’t have that. You’ve got deals made informally, often by text messages and by phone, no more than that. You have trade often conducted with people carrying goods back in their own luggage, you know, 900 mobile phones in their 32kg (70.5 lb.) luggage limit. You often have trade done by individuals carrying goods back across customs. So it’s a different kind of trade, but it seems to be effective. And Chungking Mansions is hardly unique in this regard. Lowend globalisation is the way most of the world practices globalisation—it’s not done by multinational corporations. If you go to Africa, if you go to South Asia, most globalisation is done by these traders, often working under the radar of the law. That’s how it works.
There are some 6,000 asylum seekers in Hong Kong, mostly from South Asian and African countries, and many of them congregate at Chungking Mansions. Besides its
economic functions, the building also has a social function, with volunteers teaching language classes, and various NGOs assisting  asylum seekers.
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Tell me about the typical products and typical business transactions carried out in the building. The simplest transactions are when a trader talks to somebody at a stall selling wholesale goods, and the trader may want 600 copies of this or 2,000 models of that, and so on. That’s a rather simple trade. But there are all kinds of other versions and variations of trade that go on. A friend of mine who works as a cargo agent found out about abalone that were caught in Somalia and then sent through Saudi Arabia. He was looking for a Chinese buyer, and he and this guy in this tiny little stall were trying to work out business arrangements between the Somalis, the Saudis and the Chinese. That’s one more deal that goes on, and this deal was worth a couple of million US dollars, so we’re not talking about small amounts of money here. There’s a whole array of different kinds of deals that go on from the simplest retail transaction—‘I want to buy a phone’—to the more complicated variations of trade involving the manufacturer in China with a middleman and warehouses in Hong Kong, shipping goods to various places in Africa, or the reverse of this, food or gems from Africa to China. These can involve a remarkably complicated sort of logistics. There are sellers of all kinds. There is a Hong Kong Chinese opal dealer, who buys opals from Australia, which are then sent to Shenzhen, China, for processing, then shipped to his office in Hong Kong to be sent back to Australia as a tourist souvenir. The tourists who buy them are typically mainland Chinese who want to buy Australian souvenirs. However, since Australian labour costs are high and Chinese labour costs are low, these Chinese tourists are buying Chinese-processed opals, courtesy of this man in Chungking Mansions. You mentioned a staggering figure: you estimate that 20% of the mobile phones used in sub-Saharan Africa pass through the building.
The main entrance to Chungking Mansions is via escalator from crowded Nathan Road. On the ground floor and first floor there are retail
How is that possible? The traders told me that my figure was too low, that it was more than that. On the other hand, more traders are going through China, and I also think that more components are being sent to Africa, so there are some cottage factories making phones in Kenya, in Tanzania, in Nigeria, and in other places. But on average, when I did my research for my book, a phone stall might sell 20,000 phones a month, and if I multiplied this by the number of stalls, I got a figure that I could then divide into the total number of mobile phone subscriptions in sub-Saharan Africa to come up with the figure that 20% of the phones now in use in sub-Saharan Africa have come through Chungking Mansions. This, anyway, was true in 2007–2008; I suspect that the figure is a bit lower now. How does a phone get from a factory in mainland China to an end customer in Nigeria? It depends very much on whether you’re talking about counterfeit phones or genuine phones. Genuine phones are substantially easier because no one can easily confiscate those phones. Counterfeit phones are a little more difficult, but most of them do get by. And my estimate is that less than 1% of counterfeit goods ever get caught in Hong Kong Airport. It’s pretty easy to get them through. Bribery, too, is often fairly matter of fact. If you’re taking these goods into Nigeria, for example, you’re going to have to pay people off, but you factor that into the deal. It’s just one more business expense. This is a reasonable transaction for all concerned. And the majority of the goods are transported out by individuals, in their suitcases? By individuals, but these individuals are often operating with family members, with a loose confederacy of people. So it isn’t your lone individual, it’s people working together. And if you’re in Chungking Mansions, you always see people on their mobile phones, constantly,
and wholesale shopping areas, while the second floor is occupied by a shopping mall. The third through the 17th floors of three blocks
contain mainly guesthouses reachable by staircases or tiny elevators. Different blocks can be reached only by returning to the ground floor.
A typical mobile phone stand sells about 20,000 phones a month, mainly to African clients. The selection ranges from genuine brandname items to used and refurbished
units to outright counterfeits of varying quality. The roughly 90 mobile phone vendors in Chungking Mansions sell over 20 million units a year.
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There is an inherent need for trust here: you can’t rely on a contract. The person you’re dealing with needs to be able to trust you, or you’ll never see them again.
because they’re talking back to their confederates in Zambia or in the Congo or in Kenya or in Nigeria or Ghana, finding out customers’ exact orders; then they’re calling China, or the Hong Kongers are calling China. So you see these constant interactions and communications going on. For example, a phone trader from Tanzania comes to Hong Kong once a month, buying phones from China, and taking them back to Africa as extra luggage. He takes 700 phones per trip, covering his flight and accommodation, and he makes a profit of around US$500 per trip. Others use the spare baggage quotas of their fellow traders. The phones are packaged and wrapped in a particular fashion so the screening machines will not pick up the fact that the phones have batteries in them, which is often against the airlines’ rules. Couldn’t they just phone in their orders? Those who have long-term relationships with their supplier sometimes stay in their
home countries, placing the orders via people who come to Hong Kong. But overwhelmingly the business is done in person. In this informal economy the merchandise needs to be inspected piece by piece, and business negotiations take place face to face. What are the typical dreams and goals of these people, and how do they try to fulfil them? I mean, I suppose most of the traders come with a desire to make money and become the new middle class. The merchants in Chungking Mansions are predominantly interested in finding good quality and good sources for mobile phones or clothing. With phones, this is often very, very difficult because there are no prices listed. So this isn’t a simple matter of you go to a vendor who gives you a price, and you sell for a profit: no, it’s always this more complicated negotiation. Buyers had better know what they’re doing. The buyers in Chungking Mansions often see an area that is neglected in their home country and buy products to fit that. One trader once told me that he made his biggest killing ever by buying coloured handkerchiefs. He felt that in his home country there was a real market for those, and he told me he made US$15,000 rather easily buying a lot of these Chinese-made handkerchiefs. In other cases it’s very difficult—you’ve got to be smart, because if you make a mistake you’re left with a lot of goods that just don’t work. I know one trader from an East African country who made a mistake in buying phones, thinking there would be a big market for this new Chinese model. It turns out no one wanted to buy it— there were other, better models there. So he lost US$5,000 all in one shot, enough that he couldn’t come back. So you’re always running this risk. Large-scale cheating doesn’t happen, or else the business wouldn’t continue. One thing that has to be remembered is there is an inherent need for trust in all of these businesses: because
People of more than 120 nationalities converge in Chungking Mansions. In particular, entrepreneurs from the developing world see here a chance to earn money they could
not earn back at home. United by mutual economic interests, people of different religions and ethnic groups coexist fairly peacefully.
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it’s informal you can’t rely on a contract, and if you’re selling phones or buying phones, you know, you need to be able to trust the person you’re dealing with, or you’ll never see them again. And most of the phone merchants I know do rely on a few dozen steady traders who keep coming back, and you can only do that by not ripping somebody off. Ripping somebody off is a way you can get a short-term profit, but in the long-term you’ll lose. And so I think there is an inherent morality that, not always but largely, tends to work here. How do the Chinese and Africans get along? It’s a little complicated because there’s a difference between Hong Kong and mainland Chinese. Most Hong Kong Chinese know English, and English is the lingua franca of Chungking Mansions. Mainland Chinese entrepreneurs typically do not know English, and so there’s a language gap. In Chungking Mansions the dominant merchant group remains not Hong Kong Chinese, but Pakistanis. Indians too, but Pakistanis particularly. They are the middlemen between mainland-Chinese goods and African or Asian buyers. So ethnically it’s quite interesting. Language is important because now many African and Middle Eastern traders are going into Guangzhou, a large mainland Chinese city. Often it’s very difficult for them because the chances of getting cheated seem to be far higher in China, higher not because of a lack of morality on the part of the Chinese so much as because of language: if you know the language of the person you’re dealing with, it’s a lot easier to do business. Every trader I know on the mainland reports getting cheated sometimes. In Hong Kong that seems to be less likely to happen. What is the relationship between the traders and the local police? Traders don’t have much of a relationship because they tend to be there only briefly, say only two weeks or a month. The stronger relationships are with the merchants. And if they’re Pakistani they may have lived in Hong Kong for generations, but they still might feel excluded from the Chinese community—especially the asylum seekers. They are a really important group because many of the labourers you see on the ground floors of Chungking Mansions are
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asylum seekers, and often they are there to try and make a living at wages that no Hong Kong person would accept. Some of the other asylum seekers, particularly African, are genuine political asylum seekers and have been persecuted in their home countries. These are the intellectuals of Chungking Mansions. They are extraordinarily intelligent; they come to my classes and give talks, for example. Chinese and Hong Kong university students have never met and spoken with Africans or South Asians before, and so the intercultural communication is quite valuable, and it does go on. So the building has a social function as well. It’s a sort of community centre as well as an international trade hub? Absolutely. The social function is extraordinarily important because if you are African or South Asian in Hong Kong, you run the great risk of being isolated, separated from anyone you know. And Chungking Mansions is a way to meet your compatriots. So I know many, many Africans and South Asians who come back to Chungking Mansions every free evening to be with people, speak their own language. What brings you to the building now, since your book has already been published? I still teach asylum seekers. I have a link to these guys; I know them very well. I’m also doing research in Guangzhou right now, so I’m spending a lot of time in China, but Guangzhou and Chungking Mansions continue to be linked by low-end globalisation, and so I continue to see that. And I should also say my friends are in Chungking Mansions. I really love dealing with people in Chungking Mansions. ☐
Suzanne Wales is an Australian writer based in Barcelona. Having lived in rural West Africa, she has seen what a handicap a lack of a dependable light source can be.
A HOLE IN THE DARKNESS
When a women’s collective first encounters a Foroba Yelen portable lamp, reactions can range from suspicion to curiosity to delight. Lamps are owned by
these associations, which elect a committee to manage and allocate the lamps within the community. Photo: Matteo Ferroni
Beef butchered and offered for sale by the village ton (youth collective). Because of the climate, butchering must be done quickly and at night. In the space of a
few hours the youths slaughter the bull, portion the meat and call the villagers together by megaphone. The money raised supports the ton’s collective
activities, including ceremonies, literacy classes, road repairs and mosque maintenance. Photo: Matteo Ferroni
Women gather at the village fountain, which is supplied by a remote pump for one hour each morning and evening. Such exclusively female gatherings are
an important source of empowerment for the women, a forum for them to share information and build community. Photo: Matteo Ferroni
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Even a simple portable lamp has the potential to improve people’s lives, but only if it is introduced with respect for their culture.
A portable Foroba Yelen lamp provides light for a literacy class traditionally run
by the village’s ton. The class is for working children and adult women; girls, who
often are not sent to school, are the ones who benefit most. Photo: Matteo Ferroni
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As simple as the design is, it has many cultural and developmental ramifications. In the spirit of the communal society, the lamp is designed to illuminate human activities, not public places, the very concept of which is absent in the local culture.
When visitors come to Africa they can suddenly find themselves ‘cracked open’, as the British writer and expert on Africa Richard Dowden so eloquently put it. One of the reasons is that life’s basic demands become more immediate: everyday acts such as work, celebration and education depend on the availability of essentials such as water, light and food, items whose acquisition, at least in the vast rural areas, is rarely straightforward. This was certainly the experience of Matteo Ferroni, an Italian architect who first visited Mali in 2010. At the time in a relationship with a Malian singer, he went with the intention of building an open-air theatre in the villagenucleus near Segou, 235km (146 mi.) northeast of Mali’s capital Bamako. Almost immediately he noticed that villagers did not follow Western sleeping patterns. Instead, they would sleep for many hours during the heat of the day and would often get up to work in the middle of the long night (Mali’s night-times average 12 hours), relying on dangerous petrol lanterns and cheap battery-operated torches for illumination. He also observed how these rural societies consisted of networks of collectives defined by traditional cultural roles: women, young people, agricultural workers, story tellers, healers and so on. Possessions and land were not owned by individuals but shared within these social structures, and any innovation Ferroni could offer would also have to function within the context of the community for the common good.
These observations formed the backbone of a new project. ‘The idea occurred to me straight away,’ says Ferroni from his home in Umbria, Italy, having just made a return trip to Mali. This idea was, in essence, a simply constructed, transportable light post. The principal materials are largely re-purposed items: a bicycle wheel, a water pipe, an aluminium stand, a solar panel and a 15-watt rechargeable LED module, the only piece that needs to be imported. The water pipe becomes the lamp’s telescopic post, while the bicycle wheel provides portability, one of the design’s main assets. Constructing the unit can take a couple of days or months, depending on the availability of materials and the disposition of the local craftsmen. For all of the lamp’s obvious design merits, Ferroni didn’t want his invention to be a commodity, but rather a benefit to all the people he made it for. He set up a foundation, eLand, and together with local authorities and volunteer organisations carried out an in-depth study of the work and social habits of rural Malians living off the lighting grid. They discovered (perhaps not surprisingly) that it’s the female and youth collectives that bear the brunt of the work. Women strengthen the village unit through polygamous marriages, entrepreneurship and education, whilst young people pick up technical expertise during their visits to the urban centres. Camaraderie prevails over competitiveness in both groups as individuals strive to contribute to the community.
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The LED creates a circle of light, a night-time counterpoint to the circle of shade cast by a tree, which is a traditional work and meeting place in rural Mali.
Female and youth collectives were made responsible for the success of the project, which the women themselves named Foroba Yelen, which means ‘common good’. Young people learn how to construct the lamppost at eLand’s Atelier Luminaire (light workshop), take care of the solar charging panel and spare parts, and communicate progress to the foundation via email. Women on the other hand are entrusted with the lamps’ ownership. They create a common fund to buy the lights at a heavily subsidised price, then nominate a group of eight custodians who are in charge of maintenance, recharging and hiring them out to other villages and collectives. Foroba Yelen is in great demand for celebrations such as weddings, baptisms and funerals, the last of which are always carried out at night due to Mali’s high temperatures. But it also lights up milling, bathing, childbirth or any one of African life’s immediate demands. The extra income earned by the women is tremendously empowering and has led to an increase in literary classes, health checks and other activities that couldn’t previously be carried out in the still of the night. ‘I was nearly in tears when I saw how well the project was going,’ continues Ferroni. ‘Whilst I was there it was used for three funerals, vaccinating chickens and the butchering of a cow, something that before was done by flashlight.’ Presently, 56 Foroba Yelen lampposts are in use across 12 villages. The goal is to reach ten more villages before an impact study is carried out by
the University of Barcelona. His ultimate aim is for the project to be replicated by NGOs and developmental organisations, and certainly in West Africa, where collective communities are commonplace, it’s a viable option. At €240 the lamppost is cheap compared to ‘fixed’ solar street lamps, and the LED unit accounts for 70% of the cost. Because the latter is such a key element, Ferroni worked together with Nadlec LLC to develop a special model that casts a glow demarcated by sharp shadows, inviting people to enter, interact and exit again. ‘The villagers call it “a hole in the darkness”,’ says Ferroni, adding that the next steps are to try to get the LEDs manufactured inside Mali, and to adapt the design to pirogues, the long, narrow boats used by local fishermen. Not just a product design, Foroba Yelen is a process that incorporates local craftsmen. ‘With the model for fishermen we will be adding a canoe-maker to the chain.’ ☐
The Foroba Yelen project is run by Fondazione eLand with ADM Faso Gnetaà with the support of Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Hans Wilschut is a Dutch photographer interested in the boundaries between the public and private domains. He travelled to South Africa to document the man-made trees in Johannesburg.
THE LARGEST MAN-MADE FOREST IN THE WORLD
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Mobile telephone base stations with their antennas, transmitters, receivers and other components have become a necessary part of our environment, part of the price we pay to be connected
ubiquity. In dense urban areas they may be separated by as little as 400 to 800m (0.25 to 0.5 mi.).
24Â hours a day, everywhere we go. On the other hand, there is frequent local opposition to new masts, not only because of their unattractive appearance, but also because of their radiation and their sheer
Small wonder then, that network operators try to make their base stations as unobtrusive as possible, blending them in with the surrounding area. Because of the lush local vegetation, many mobile phone masts in this city are disguised as
trees. Dutch photographer Hans Wilschut documented these camouflaged masts in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The South African company Brolaz Projects is credited with creating the first disguised base stations in 1996. Almost overnight, their palm tree masts sprang up in a Cape Town suburb. The ‘bark’ is created by surface manipulation using
special colorants and coatings which are applied to the steel trunk. Brolaz Projects specialises in towers resembling palms, whose shape provides a sufficiently large platform at the top of the tower.
Barbara Eldredge is a design writer and researcher based in New York. She wrote an article about Kwikpoint’s Visual Language Translators for the previous issue of WTW.
SMUGGLER CHEFS
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Success in this prestigious international competition depends not only on the chefs’ culinary skills, but also on their smuggling techniques.
To highlight culinary diversity, contestant chefs are encouraged to incorporate their national heritages into their creations, so most chefs bring local ingredients in specially designed coolers. Previous spread: The US team’s Richard Rosendale unpacks herbs brought in from Huron, Ohio. Left: Commis Corey Siegel checks ingredients that can make or break the team’s performance. Photos: Bonjwing Lee
In mid-January of 1971, when the legendary chef Paul Bocuse arrived in the US to prepare a dinner for 12 at the Four Seasons Hotel, he waltzed through customs with suitcases brimming with flour, salt, chickens, tarragon, bay leaves, crayfish, petits fours, truffled sausage, tomatoes, green beans, cream, butter, foie gras, woodcocks, a wild duck, sauce base in plastic bags, two kilos of truffles, and fresh pig bladders. These last prized ingredients, according to an account by food critic Gael Greene, were hidden in the sleeves of a jacket deep in his luggage beneath layers of Bocuse’s underwear. The art of the culinary smuggle is as inextricably entwined with the art of French cooking as Bocuse’s ingredients were that day intermingled with his boxers. Years later, when Bocuse founded an international culinary competition, he did more than further the global prestige of fine cuisine: he became the muse of a covert craft—that of spiriting foods from the market or garden of one country and onto the plates of another. Today, the Bocuse d’Or is the World Cup, Olympics, and Super Bowl of culinary competitions. Some chefs train for years, working towards their goal of standing on the winner’s podium holding the trophy: a golden figurine of Paul Bocuse poised atop the globe. Every two years, hundreds of brilliant chefs from more than 50 countries all over the globe compete in gruelling qualifying rounds to earn the privilege of representing their country at the finals in Lyon, France. In the ensuing months, these select chefs and their supporting organisations spend innumerable hours and thousands or even hundreds of thousands dollars to prepare. (This year, the American chef Richard Rosendale famously built a precise replica of the Bocuse competition kitchen so he could practice cooking in the space.) The rules of the Bocuse d’Or are akin to those of Iron Chef in that all contestants have five and a half hours to prepare one meat dish and one fish dish, with primary ingredients dictated by the Bocuse organisation. ‘It’s like asking da Vinci to paint the Mona Lisa in five and a half hours,’ said Angela May, who has served as the competition’s English-speaking emcee for the past several years. ‘The food is incredible, like nothing you would see in a normal dining experience. When the plates are finally finished and presented, you can hear the audience gasp.’
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International chefs travelling with their delicacies know that French customs officials are relatively lax compared to their American or Asian counterparts. Last June, it was announced that the central meat ingredient would be oxtail. A mere eight weeks before the competition, chefs learned that the fish plates would feature turbot and lobster. Both meals would be accompanied by at least three different garnishes, elaborately plated. This year’s contest featured a few rule tweaks to foster risk-taking and creativity. Two of the garnishes were to be made using ingredients selected the night before in a specially created Bocuse market. A third garnish would evoke the chefs’ home country to ‘illustrate their chefs’ culinary heritage and encourage diversity’. On the day of the event, each chef is allotted a fully equipped kitchen cubicle open to the prying eyes of press, judges and fans. The chefs bring their own serving platters, specialised cooking equipment and all of the food ingredients not supplied by the competition. In late January, when the chosen 24 contestant-chefs converged in Lyon for the 14th biannual competition, they surreptitiously imported vegetable and meat stocks, home-grown spices, fruits and specially sourced dairy and eggs from their home nations. For Heidi Pinnak, the chef of Team Estonia, it was easy to bring the Estonian vegetables, cranberries, apples, potatoes, quail eggs, cream, butter and Vana Tallinn liqueur she would use in her Bocuse cuisine. ‘All my Estonian products travelled with two drivers from Tallinn to Lyon,’ she wrote in a recent email. ‘Estonia has always followed the principle of introducing local tastes.’ When Pinnak’s meat platter was finally finished, her supporters blew foghorns and frantically waved the blue, black and white tricolour of Estonia. In spite of the haute-cuisine character of the competition and refined discipline of the competing chefs, the auditorium is bedlam. Hundreds of supporters cram onto risers opposite the chefs’ kitchens and yell with the raucous abandon of half-drunk soccer fans. They wear colourful team-themed garb and wave flags and painted banners. They make such an incredible amount of noise that many chefs feel obliged to train with speakers blaring the earsplitting soundtrack of past audiences. The crowd blows foghorns and hits cowbells in a cacophony of sound. These audience antics are an element dating back to 1997, the first
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year that supporters of Team Mexico brought a mariachi band to enliven their chef’s time in the kitchen. Among the ingredients brought to Lyon this year by Chef Miguel Quezada from his native Mexico were vanilla, cactus fruit liquor, fresh cornflour, fried pork skin, multicoloured cocoa beans, and hoja santa, an aromatic heart-shaped leaf used to wrap tamales. Quezada learned his simple smuggling technique from a friend. He told me, ‘You only need to wrap the products with black clothes and put them in your luggage as any other article of clothing. I’ve never had problems.’ For the American team, bringing many of their own ingredients from the United States was not a poetic gesture but a strategic one. The American chef Richard Rosendale readily acknowledged that ‘an American egg that is almost industrially produced will not cook the same as a French egg where the chicken eats different things according to the seasons’. It would be suicide for any chef to compete using ingredients whose characteristics were unfamiliar to him. Rosendale used duct tape and Styrofoam to create a custom cooler in his suitcase to protect ingredients like frozen cooking stocks en route to France. He vacuum packaged his clothes so they would fit in the small space not occupied by ingredients and tools. In 2009, the American team brought practically all of their produce, including turnips, celery, broccolini, avocados, leeks, oranges, carrots and cabbage, from their restaurant’s garden in Yountville, California. According to Andrew Friedman’s account of the 2009 competition, Knives At Dawn, ‘Somehow the team sailed right through customs without a single interrogative challenge to their mountain of luggage. It must have been because it was Bocuse d’Or season, as young cooks roll into town every other January with similarly massive hauls.’ Granted, international customs rules can be mind-numbingly convoluted. It took this writer several hours of online digging, phone calls to two French embassies and three departments of des Douanes (French Customs) to find a website purported to reveal the legal status of edible imports. The writer was greeted with a practically unusable system of codes and inputs that baffled even her French translator. Thankfully, for those participating in the Bocuse d’Or, this confusion does not deter, and unlike the perpetually vigilant US customs authorities, des Douanes is notoriously lax. Perhaps it is the dearth of pernicious fruit flies or non-native fungi due to such imports. Or maybe it is because the French understand the powerful impact of place on the food it creates. A key tenet of the French culinary tradition is the concept of terroir: that a food’s place of origin profoundly alters its quality and characteristics. Terroir is why French eggs vary with the seasons, why American flour is more glutinous, and why the Sri Lankan chef Buddhika Samarasekara was determined to bring his own crab from Colombo. When chef Samarasekara arrived in Shanghai for the Asian finals in June, contraband-sniffing dogs yelped at the box
Each team consists of three people: a lead chef, a sous-chef, and a coach. They have five hours and 35 minutes to prepare two elaborate presentations, a meat dish and a fish dish,
in an open kitchen facing the jury, media and a screaming audience of about 1000. Photo: Bonjwing Lee
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containing, among other ingredients, his carefully packed Sri Lankan crab. The authorities confiscated integral components of the cuisine he was to cook the next day. Remarkably, in a moment of near-clairvoyance, he’d anticipated trouble and outmanoeuvred Chinese customs. ‘I packed a second set of ingredients in my luggage,’ he told me. ‘Just put it in my clothes, and they missed it.’ Samarasekara went on to win fourth place in the Asian finals, securing a spot in Lyon. Nervous about having to pull the same stunt in France, he spoke with Bocuse officials. ‘They told me not to worry,’ he recalled. On judging day, the Sri Lankan aubergines on Samarasekara’s fish plates were stuffed with Sri Lankan crab. Of the past 13 Bocuse d’Or competitions, Norway has been on the podium eight times; Sweden, five times. France has been on the podium ten times and won gold in seven, including the most recent contest. This year was only the second time in the competition’s history that an Asian team even made it to the podium. Chef Noriyuki Hamada, who won third place, is the Executive Chef of Hotel Bleston Court, a French restaurant in Karuizawa, Japan. ‘I think France often wins because of the culture,’ Angela May told me. ‘They grow up knowing who Paul Bocuse is and have a deep-seated knowledge and passion for food and cuisine.’ But economics is also a factor. Teams have differing amounts of resources and time. Denmark has already chosen the chef that will compete in the next Bocuse d’Or Europe, the preliminary round to get to Lyon in 2015. He now has time to formulate his ideas and concepts. This year, Mexico’s chef Quezada had only a few months after winning the qualifying round in Mexico to perfect his oxtail pyramid for the finals. The US coach Gavin Kaysen, who was a Bocuse competitor in 2007, told me that the French ‘definitely have a home field advantage. It’s also easier to ship ingredients from France to Norway.’ In other words, chefs able to use French ingredients in their everyday cooking benefit from not having to worry about the national differences between chickens, sour creams, or asparaguses. I asked Kaysen if it was because of the ingredients that the French seem to always win the Bocuse d’Or. He told me no. ‘France does so well because it is a French competition built on French techniques and tastes. Mexico did really beautiful stuff with their food. But they took 24th place because the judges are not able to understand the flavours.’ Several years ago, Kaysen was bringing bags of flour back to the US from France (French flour makes a less glutinous dough). He didn’t think anything of it until one of the four bags burst in transit, spilling a fine white powder all over Kaysen’s suitcase. ‘It was during the anthrax scare,’ he recalled, ‘and I knew it did not look good so I just walked right up to the first customs guy I saw and explained the whole story: “Honest to God, it’s only flour.” He was cool about it and let me go through.’ Asked if it was more important to obey customs laws or to cook good food, Kaysen paused for a moment before answering. ‘I’ll just say this: you have to do what you have to do to win.’ ☐
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