Building communities, and communities so built

Abstract

Methods of providing a habitable community having usable habitation facilities, and electric and water utilities, including providing a community construction service pack and corresponding community construction services by which such service pack is rapidly installed at a location in need of such rapidly-built community. Such rapidly-built community may be used e.g. to meet the needs of a population suffering from a recent disaster and / or to meet the needs of a population in need of community facilities at a newly-to-be occupied site remote from human habitation and / or human habitation facilities. The invention thus is able to rapidly provide one or more limited-size functional communities on an urgent-need basis where each community initially has its own community local electric service system and its own community local water service, which may be functional even though local housing units may have been severely damaged or destroyed.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0001]The focus of this invention is to provide housing and utility infrastructure, both set-up services and ongoing operating services, to meet basic needs of discreet numbers of people whereby individual communities are set up and serviced, optionally proximate each other, optionally linking utility services.[0002]More specifically, this invention relates to creating a habitable community, of limited and pre-determined size, having basic, optionally temporary, electric and water utility services, using modular habitation units as the living quarters, and using readily mass produced components to build the utility systems which provide the water and electric services.[0003]There is a historic need for sturdy, relatively inexpensive, readily shippable, enclosed, human inhabitable shelters which may be used for a wide range of purposes, on a wide range of sites and in a wide range of environments; inhabitable shelters which can readily survive the rigors of...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0015]This invention provides methods of providing a habitable community having usable habitation facilities, and electric and water utilities, including providing a community construction service pack and corresponding community construction service system by which such service pack is rapidly installed at a location in need of such rapidly-built community. Such rapidly-built community may be need e.g. to meet the needs of a population suffering from a recent disaster and / or to meet the needs of a population in need of community facilities at a newly-to-be occupied site remote from human habitation and / or human habitation facilities. The invention thus is able to rapidly provide one or more limited-size functional communities on an urgent-need basis.

Problems solved by technology

Such disasters, whether natural or man-made, often displace large numbers of people, either through the destruction of their homes, by making it difficult or impossible to reach or live in their homes, and / or by disrupting conventional, e.g. central-generation, grid-based utility services.

While overall economies of scale suggest that central generation facilities typically provide the most cost effective delivery of electrical and water utility services, putting such central generation facilities in place and building corresponding cost effective distribution systems, or repairing or replacing such systems which have been damaged or destroyed by disaster events, are highly capital-intensive projects, requiring long lead times and substantial quantities of custom made equipment / machines, as well as large capital expenditures; and there is no capability, during construction of the critical generation capability of such central-generation systems, to provide relatively short-response time, limited-capacity, utility services to relatively smaller segments of the population ultimately expected to be serviced by such central generation facility.

Another and apparently unrelated problem arises from the matter of trade shipment imbalances between countries or between areas of a country.

Such situations can result in a shipping imbalance wherein empty shipping containers, that is, the means by which the goods are shipped, either accumulate at the receiving locale or are shipped empty back to the source locale.

The return of empty shipping containers is often regarded as uneconomical.

Thus, the non-return and accumulation of empty shipping containers represents a significant lost investment in raw materials and construction costs, as well as an opportunity presented by a low-cost resource which is susceptible to conversion to other uses.

The accumulation of empty, unreturned sea / land shipping containers is a particularly significant matter as the containers are manufactured in significant quantities and are sufficiently inexpensive to be commonly used in “one way” trades but, because of the number of containers involved in one-way trades, represent significant unrecovered value in both raw materials and construction costs.

A stand-alone ocean shipping container, converted for use as a portable human habitation unit, does not, by itself, create a safe living environment without the provision of basic utility services such as electricity service and water service, available to such habitation unit.

Yet basic utility services such as electricity and water are not readily available in many of the places, in many of the circumstances, where the need is greatest for housing of displaced people, such as in areas affected by natural or man-made disasters or in the face of abject poverty.

Further, in the face of such needs, the local government is typically unable to quickly provide even basic electricity and water services.

Neither do conventional grid utility suppliers quickly build and provide such services.

Similarly, conventional suppliers of modular habitation units, while able to prepare the habitation unit to receive electricity and water utility services, are not, themselves, able to supply such utility services.

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