The french magazine Le Courrier International has an interesting hors-série on the topic of new ways to live in houses/flat. It deals with wooden skyscrapers, mini-house, ecotech, post-communists houses, renewed castle, containers... The container thing and the japanese small houses are definitely my favorites. This concept of a container city in London seems great:

Containers are an extremely flexible method of construction, being both modular in shape, extremely strong structurally and readily available.

Container Cities offer an alternative solution to traditional space provision. They are ideal for office and workspace, live-work and key-worker housing.