Shipping Containers: Icons of Our Era?

Boing-Boing has a photo of shipping containers looming over a Hong Kong neighborhood like a coal tip in Wales. My friend in the State Dept recently assigned to Kabul for several months spent down-time living in a shipping container, as did a lot of US contractors & Embassy personnel with special security provisos. And the containers were part of a security project I was [slightly] involved in a few years ago for the Port of Miami, just after 9/11. X-Raying the containers while checking them for ambient radiation. I wonder if they are used as dwellings elsewhere---thought I saw a Nova about a project north of the Arctic Circle that employed them as temporary housing.