Caravans and Cabins
By 1 HOMAS GARNER JAMES MORE than one in every hundred of the prosperous citizens of the United States now lives the year round, happily and by choice, in a caravan-trailer. The proportion is increasing. So far as surveys can indicate, the ' trailer parks " enjoy a more developed sense of neighbourli- ness and community life than their fixed-dwelling counterparts. On the better sites are such amenities as mains-water, sanita- tion, electricity and gas piped directly to the 30-to-50-foot vans, plus private telephones; barbecue pits and flower-bordered paved patios as outdoor, sunbathed living-rooms for each van; communal swimming pools, playgrounds and television for the children; coin-operated laundries and ready-prepared frozen- food shops for the wives, as well as the usual multitudinous and ubiquitous shop-to-kitchen-door delivery services. Since most of the mobile-home owners are soldiers, airmen, veterans, retired couples or essential defence workers, who have pur- chased their cars_and trailers on conventionally easy terms, their pride of ownership and their social status make an inter- esting comparison with the average British " council-house " estate.
Organised sites catering for this auto-nomadic way of life are increasing at the rate of at least two thousand a year. With materials for trailer-coach construction given very high priority in rearmament phasing, the United Stales is thus putting on wheels the equivalent of a considerable new housing develop- ment every twenty-four hours. What may be happening, in effect, is that, as a supplement and perhaps successor to their invention of the skyscraper metropolis, the ingenious Yankees are now very close to inventing a petrol-powered mobilopolis. This report on the often queer, yet often very sensible, American way of doing things is prompted by A Spectator's Notebook paragraph of 25th April. Janus's plea for a full investigation of the possibilities of emigrating with one's own pre-fab stowed away with one's luggage has wider implications for Britain and the Commonwealth than may yet be realised. Implicit in the case for Empire settlement is the argument that a world- wide redeployment of population to open up new resources is the prerequisite for human survival. In this world-wise redeploy- ment, the British Commonwealth, with its extremes of demo- graphic disequilibrium, has both a Victorian responsibility and a truly Elizabethan opportunity. But the human and political problems of redeployment depend for their solution in the beginning on simple technics : how, literally, do we re-mobilise? How does modern man, conditioned to urban or suburban roots, re-acquire the technical capacity for development pioneering on the fringes of settlement ? How do we move quickly and cheaply from our umbilical cord and swaddling clothes of city lights and flushing water-closets out to the job at hand ?
The debate on Empire settlement rightly stressed this need for fundamental research into the " how " of redeployment as well as into the." why." It is evident that the technical prob- lems of financing the capital-investment gains and losses involved in migration, and of providing shipping and new housing at a cost that will make the development-financing profitable, loom large in any practical consideration of the subject. The means to act, in fact, could determine the will to act, at least so far as Government policy is concerned. For surely only the technical difficulties and present cost of shifting people and installations on the scale necessary have been potent enough effectively to over-rule the case of the Chiefs of Staff for strategic redeployment. Considering the Commonwealth as a 'whole, just as industrial decentralisation is the starting-point of defence, so the raw-materials frontier is now the point where basic rearmament must begin. Come cold war or hot, the Commonwealth's biggest need is a simple way to mobilise its Work-power. A hundred years ago the American technique for transcontinental mobility was the four-to-six-horse covered wagon or " prairie schooner "—a lorry, river-crossing boat and home combined, which, as every schoolboy knows, could also serve as a temporary fort against Indian raids. With his rifle. axe, household goods and family aboard, the prairie-schooner pilot could drop his ploughshare anchor almost anywhere he chose.
A bare ten years ago the American pioneer's descepdants were redeploying again, by the millions, to aircraft assembly plants and shipbuilding yards on the South and West coasts. It is safe to say that the clouds of American warplanes and the fleets of Liberty ships could not have been launched in time without the exceptional labour mobility which the flexible car- and-caravan combination—an updated prairie schooner—gave to America's worker armies. The miracle of World War II's civilian redeployment was surpassed in the prodigious tech- nique of the fighting services. Task forces able to plant " new town " air-bases on jungle islands almost overnight showed the American logistical genius at its performance peak. The Navy—packing self-contained villages aboard LCTs—didn't even need a jungle island. In the last stages of the Pacific recon- quest, the naval command manoeuvred fleet-trains which could refuel, refit and even drydock and repair fighting ships at sea. Such engineering of forward-base mobility was probably the. real revolutionary technique of the war; the bulldozer and peripatetic machine-shop, rather than the bomb, having brought the victory.
Now how much of this Yankee contribution toward mobilo- polis can be applied to the Commonwealth's present overriding need for redeployment in the midst of retrenchment ? A small Anglo-American team at London's School of Planning concerned with the need for finding the Commonwealth ocean-crossing equivalent of the American prairie-crossing covered wagon has now designed a family- sized " cabin-plus-caravan " accommodating the migrants over land or sea as well as at their destination. This " transportable housing unit " is, in effect, a self-contained shipboard suite, complete with shower and bath, separate lavatory, galley, food- and clothes-storage space, two double berths and two single berths, in addition to a comfortable dining-living-room and two separate dressing-rooms. This six-person suite fits within a total of 1,200 cubic feet; and, even more remarkable, weighs less than a ton. As such, it compares favourably in space and weight with accepted maritime practice in passenger accommodation. This self-contained triple-purpose suite would be equally al home aboard an air freighter, as deck cargo on a tramp steamer, mounted on a rail flat-car, or on its own wheels as a road-trailer, skidding across snowy muskeg or half-tracking over deserts, incorporated in the body-structure of a motorised caravan, or jacked-up oh pillars as the nucleus of a fixed permanent home.
With it as a temporary cabin arrangement, any cargo ship can become a migrant-carrying ship, as Mr. Geoffrey de Freitas has pointed out in a recent House of Commons debate on migration. Outward bound with cabin-caravans and human contents, the cargo ship would be left free to carry its normal freight on the return voyage—the cabin-caravans and migrants continuing overland to sites far more easily prepared than would be sites for fixed pre-fabs. Such a two-way arrangement could promise considerable reductions in the present heavy one-way cost of transporting migrants plus pre-fabricated housing across the Commonwealth-linking oceans. So successful has been the paincipal designer of the team, Mr. William H. Groves, in putting a quart of migrant-accom- modating capacity into a pint pot of structural weight and consequent cost, that, at the urging of friends on the Migration Council, he is now preparing to carry his research further at that treasure-house of advanced technics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, U.S.A.—where autonomous transportable housing is the speciality of people such as philosopher-mechanic Mr. Buckminster Fuller. M.I.T. has accepted Groves as a " visiting Fellow." What about internal migration ? It is a measure of the Government's grasp of essentials that Mr. Butler's disinflation is accompanied by partly off-setting subsidies for housing. But isn't Mr. Butler's retrenchment shaking people loose from less essential jobs faster than Mr. Macmillan can find new roosts for them ? Shouldn't mobile housing and quickly prepared trailer-sites get far higher priority as a short-term supplement to permanent housing ? All parties recognise that economic flexibility won by disinflation will be frustrated if housing is not physically available for the necessary shift in labour. Professor W. A. Lewis has written, " Without easy mobility none of our problems is soluble." And the need- for mobility applies to limited physical resources such as housing perhaps even more strongly than to finance.
In fact, Janus's plea for a full investigation of the possibili- ties of making the migrant into an armadillo, carrying his housing-shell along with him, applies as urgently to defence rehousers and trading-estate developers, to local council slum- clearers, to Scottish Highlands re-peoplers and Wash reclaimers, to air-force basers and army headquarters and civil engineer campers, as it applies to " new Australians." Whether " out- country " or merely " out-county," the prototype of a mobile new town incorporating the British invention of a trading estate plus mobility needs now a British inventing lead. That lead, if ingenious enough, could set the Commonwealth and world adventuring again as in the first Elizabeth's reign.
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