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

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 acc

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