The container is one the central icons of capitalist globalization: It's main function is of course the standardized worldwide shipping of goods (to connect low-income areas with consumer areas). It is also often used by the state for the housing of refugees, and over the last years we have seen containers used to build up temporary borders at summits, as fortification of the red zones in Quebec or Genova. In Göteborg they were additionally used for the closing in of the Hvitfeldska school and to build up temporary prison cells for actvists.
We could speak of the container as the Lego-brick module of the Empire, the main visual icon of today's power structures - just as the sound of a helicopter is the audio icon. Both things, the container and the chopper-sound are present throughout the interviews we did for our project. People were talking all the time about how the containers everywhere transformed Göteborg into a labyrinth, in which they couldn't find their way through their own city. They lost their way because there were containers and fences everywhere, and here we can see how this inverted utopia of New Babylon takes place: whereas the maze in New Babylon serves to break out of the disciplinary capitalist functionalism, it helps to keep up the regime now.