What Happened to the World Cup Shipping Container Hotels?

Late last year, ahead of the Qatar World Cup, as the world’s press picked over every last on and off-the-pitch storyline, one tale rose out of the din in Doha. It was about bad housing. It turned out that in the scramble to meet demand from traveling fans, organizers had assembled sprawling camps of shipping containers outfitted with WiFi and air-conditioning and tweaked to house humans. Reporter after reporter took their turn rolling in to one of these units to tell the world what it was like to sleep in a box. It turned out it was OK. Not great. A little weird.

If the story had ended there, the shipping containers would have been another small reminder of the logistical insanity of hosting the World Cup in a country roughly the size of Queens (and the underlying corruption that led the decision to be made in the first place). Then, in February, Qatar announced it had found a lofty new purpose for its punchline shipping containers. They were going to become housing for victims of the massive 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes.

"In view of the urgent needs in Turkey and Syria," an unnamed official with the Qatar Development Fund told Reuters in February, "we have taken the decision to ship our cabins and caravans to the region, providing much needed and immediate support." On its Instagram account, the Qatar Fund posted a video documenting the delivery of the shipping containers, in cinematic slo mo, over a propulsive Coldplay-esque piano number. "The first batch arrived at the port of Iskandarun," on the Turkish coast, the caption explained, "and the next shipments will arrive consecutively during this month." On Twitter, the Qatar Fund dramatically declared the "shipment was received by HE Sheikh Mohammed bin Nasser bin Jassim Al-Thani, Ambassador of the State of Qatar to Türkiye, in addition to high-level delegation from the Turkish side and AFAD," the Turkish equivalent of FEMA.

Impromptu prefab housing, once laughed at, now rendered urgently necessary. A neat enough story. A pure bit of propaganda for Qatar and FIFA, both of which are heavily invested in portraying the legacy of the 2022 World Cup as sweepingly transformative. But does shipping housing, whatever use it was originally intended for, out of Doha and into a post-earthquake Turkey, make any sense?

Improvised housing has, in fact, been an element of the recovery relief efforts in Turkey. Kaf Kolektiv, an aid organization dedicated to building shelters, has documented its construction of simple wood structures covered by tarps as a relatively superior alternative to tents or a corner of a school gym. A city ferry provided by the Istanbul municipality has been converted for housing. And in Japan, shipping containers do have a track record of service in earthquake relief.

The Japanese architect Shigeru Ban is the founder of the Voluntary Architects’ Network and an advocate of unorthodox solutions to creating housing for victims of natural disasters. (Many of his designs are built around paper tubes.) The 2014 book Humanitarian Architecture recounts how in 2011, following the major earthquake in Japan, "the town of Onagawa was struggling to construct enough temporary housing due to a lack of flat land" when Ban and his Voluntary Architects’ Network "proposed three-storey temporary housing made from shipping containers" that would be stacked in a "a chequerboard pattern," thereby creating "bright, open living spaces between the containers." Decrying government-provided temporary housing as "poorly made with insufficient storage space," Voluntary Architects’ Network also promised to install "cupboards and shelving."

Ban and his network further contended these structures had the "potential for permanent use." (Proud residents of storage container housing from San Francisco to León, Mexico would agree.) At least as far as can be ascertained from photos, the finished product in Onagawa was an aesthetic success. The ensuing units housed 190 households and were in use from 2011 to 2019.

But at issue is less the validity of shipping containers as temporary housing and more the situation in Doha right now. The Guardian recently sent some of its reporters back to Qatar to document life 100 days after the end of the World Cup. Uniformly, their reporting suggests that, unsurprisingly, there are people in Doha who need urgent aid, too.

Workers still struggling to pay off debts to the duplicitous agents who secured their journey into Qatar in the first place eat little and struggle to find decent lodging. Pete Pattison describes one apartment in which a worker named Ahmad "shares a tiny room with nine others. They sleep in four bunk beds packed into the room. Two more sleep on mattresses on the floor. A few packets of kaboos—flat breads similar to pitta—lie on the floor." And all the while, resources are being expended to keep up the illusion of commerce and bustle in an area built specifically for an event that has since passed, for reasons unclear to anyone. Lusail Boulevard, the showcase street jutting out of the 80,000-seat Lusail Stadium, "has around 30 scarcely used food and drink outlets along with a Sainsbury’s, fully stocked with both fresh and non-perishable products, where staff routinely outnumber customers," Nick Ames reports.

You’re left wondering: could the fan housing have been more readily repurposed as worker housing for those in need in Doha, right now? As The New York Times pointed out in their own experiential storage container piece, Doha is full of similar "permanent encampments for the migrant workers who do most of the construction and service work in Qatar. World Cup organizers appear to have employed the concept as a solution for fans." Couldn’t the "concept" have been reverted back to its original cause of worker housing?

Avaaz is a non-profit that has led activism campaigns on the issue of workers rights in Qatar. In March, they partnered with Amnesty International to criticize FIFA over its failure to address the financial losses and physical injuries suffered by migrant workers in Qatar ahead of the World Cup. "Qatar’s support for the victims of February’s devastating earthquake is extremely welcome," Bieta Andemariam, the Legal Director at Avaaz tells Dwell, "but we cannot lose sight of the abusive conditions endured by hundreds of thousands of workers building last year’s World Cup. For over 10 years workers have reported living in squalid conditions. They have faced unpaid wages, employer intimidation and forced labor in dangerously hot weather. Thousands are reported to have died or been injured. Shamefully, workers still in Qatar are reporting deteriorated working conditions, now that the global spotlight has moved off of the World Cup. And FIFA, despite raking in a record $7.5 billion from the tournament, has yet to commit a single cent to compensating workers."

Per the Qatar Fund for Development’s Twitter, only 396 out of a planned 10,000 housing units have been delivered so far. No updates have been provided since February. When reached for comment, the Qatar Fund did not respond.

Top photo of workers loading the structures formerly used during the World Cup onto a cargo ship in March by Karim Jaafar/AFP via Getty Images.

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