Overview of the Work Presented to the Committee

November 12, 2021

Thank you all for your time. After the session two days ago and after hearing some of the comments, I changed the way I want to introduce this material. First of all, let me describe why we started work so early and how the precedent study fits in with the overall housing effort.

As outlined in the precedence study, our work on housing will include four phases of work- this precedence study, the programming studies which are going on right now, the integration of the housing studies into the master plan efforts, and finally a fourth phase of redirection for us to make any changes to earlier work.

It might seem a little strange that we have started such detailed work so soon, so please let me address that. The first two phases of our work require no work on the part of the other members of the team- no mapping, not even a site- and it was something we could get started on right away. If we are discussing it in the same time frame as master planning and tenure, I don’t mean to suggest it is as important as these things.

The precedent study basically tries to understand current building methods on the island so that we might establish some kind of means for evaluating current methods, and affordable alternatives.

We have been careful not to recommend specific ways of building a given assembly but to provide a list of considerations for choosing from among reasonable choices. We start at the foundations of a house and work our way up to the roof. So for example, there are probably half a dozen types of foundations we have discussed in terms of materials, labor, ease of construction and substrate, or the ground on which a house is to be built.

The housing report is tough to work through. And unless you love construction like I do, it is probably dull material. It is for people who build and who make difficult decisions about how construction money is spent. It is not glamorous stuff, but it is important because money is always scarce.

The entire housing report could be boiled down to a plea to spend money intelligently and to good effect and to the benefit of those who live in those homes. This is the first and last point of reference for the housing report. Who is served well? And while this session is on housing, I would apply this measure to everything and to every scale. Who is served? Is the money spent to good effect?

The thing that is so tough about a construction budget is that you seldom choose between a good thing and a bad thing. The difficulty of this material, I think, is that you have to choose constantly between two good things that everyone wants, and so there have to be criteria established for how these difficult decisions are to be made. This is genuinely hard.

Honest people will disagree on the options presented in the study because the tradeoffs described are often subtle. We can lay these considerations out, but we can’t give the appropriate weight to them. Only Nauruans can, and I want to be clear that people involved in these decisions will give these decisions different weights and come to different conclusions. By all means, let us all air our concerns and our opinions. But as you continue to assess options for how to build, please keep in mind that everyone will bring good faith to this debate.

So for example, cross ventilation and natural cooling, which everyone wants, is better in thinner house plans, but thinner house plans have less efficient building envelopes and so much of the cost of construction is in exterior walls. The most expensive parts of an exterior wall are the openings, and so good cross ventilation simply costs more. I can point this out, but I can’t tell you if the extra money is worth it to you.

This precedent study is not as important at this stage as the other work that has been presented this week, but it is not trivial, either. As an example, consider the remediated land on which we are building. Everyone says, yeah, yeah yeah, it is not a problem. But in considering the question of foundations the study is very clear about concerns of settlement in the remediated areas.

No one can afford for this to be that pilot project in which foundations crack and telescope through the block because dirt between the pinnacles settled more than dirt directly over a pinnacle that is covered by only 200 mm of backfill.

Is the material in the report difficult to wade through? Yes. Is it tedious? Maybe. Are the graphics a little dry? Yes. I wish I could make it easier to engage. Does it seem early to talk about this stuff. Probably. But issues of building are serious, and we have tried to take these issues seriously. And this stuff comes first, I think, before more fun and gratifying studies that will follow.

Last evening two or three members of the steering committee mentioned a trip to Abu Dhabi. Please send photographs of the project you liked. When I ask for people to give us photographs, I also ask them to explain exactly what they liked about the project.

Was the project beautiful? Was it practical? Was it affordable? Can you see the Nauruan government subsidizing a similar project? Could it last in the Nauruan climate? Could it be built with Nauruan trades? Or does it just somehow convey, at an emotional level, a sense of a new start for Nauru housing?

The references stuck with me because, I have worked on two projects in Abu Dhabi province - one in the city of Abu Dhabi itself and one in the city of Al Ain, which is the fourth most populous city in the UAE. They represent an interesting contrast. Abu Dhabi has the confidence to import ideas from all over the world. Al Ain, an inland desert city, thinks of itself as the upholder of traditions in the UAE, consciously in contrast to Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

Another way to characterize Abu Dhabi, is that it lacks confidence in the ability of its history and culture to solve modern problems, and I think this lack of confidence in their own traditions results in a vacuum that draws in ideas from everywhere. I would say this is neither good nor bad in itself, but it is worth thinking about.

I appreciated Al Ain more because it has pride in the country’s traditions, and while these traditions are sometimes not up to solving modern problems, sometimes they are, and this faith in their culture and traditions makes decision makers from Al Ain a little more skeptical about the ideas paraded in front of them.

I’m not sure that describing Abu Dhabi as an innovative city or Al Ain as a conservative city is very helpful. Ideally, you would not have to choose between the temperaments of these two great cities, and you would draw the best from both.

You want to have Abu Dhabi’s openness to new approaches, but I think Nauru also needs to bring some of Al Ain’s pride and worldly skepticism to bear on the matter of innovation that comes from other places. And it needs to ask whether something that looks different is really innovative, and whether something that looks familiar can be innovative.

Housing is unavoidably conservative. It is a family’s most expensive asset. You don’t take undue risks with that. The ministers want to create a block and concrete industry. We agree with that, but these are not glamorous trades or building methods.

Money is also always short in any country. We asked the housing committee about using plywood roof decks to help keep water out and strengthen the houses against wind and were told that plywood is unaffordable. I understand this and accept it. But if plywood would improve the quality of Nauru housing and it is unaffordable, what does innovative housing look like?

The pre-fab housing on Nauru, which I think everyone has concerns about, was likely the innovation of its day. How has it survived with its styrofoam sandwich panels? Were the houses easily repaired by people on the island or did it make Nauruans more dependent on foreign knowledge?

Did it save money through quicker construction time, or did it stunt the development of local concrete and block trades that the ministers now want? These are the kinds of questions I would ask when you are considering the idea of innovation now.

Regarding sustainability, I sense everyone wants to talk about it in the same terms it is discussed throughout the world- in terms of energy loss across an exterior wall. But I don’t think this is helpful in Nauru. There is little difference in temperature across a Nauru wall as there is across an Abu Dhabi wall, which exists primarily because of air-conditioning, so why talk about sustainability in terms of energy loss like every other country does?

If all this sounds too conservative, I’d like to close these opening remarks by telling you why I think this early report speaks to innovation in the right sense. In addressing sustainability, Nauru should focus on the embodied energy of new construction and how to make buildings last as long as possible. Somehow we can’t manage this in the US. The competitive housing markets punish builders who want to build more durably. If Nauru could do this, it would be truly innovative.

Could Nauru housing focus on building in a way that would allow housing to be an asset after 20 or 30 years instead of having it fail and lose value? Durable construction costs a little more upfront and so it doesn’t happen naturally, and it requires you to look at longer horizons and this does not come naturally to any of us. But if you could do this, regardless of what the housing looked like, it would be innovative.

The other aspect of durability is adaptability. If housing is to be durable it has to have construction integrity, but it also needs to accommodate change over the life of its inhabitants- the growth of family size, or family income, children leaving and older parents coming back, income falling again, and renters maybe helping underwrite the cost of rent when necessary. This adaptability is a focus of the second phase of our work.

One of the words that kept coming up two days ago was ‘options’. You want options. The second phase of our work will lay out more types of housing than you can ever build. This allows us to be wide of the mark on a lot of things and still be on target enough of the time. This is the only way it seems to me that we can hope to address a range of aspirations that may not all move in concert.

The precedent report focused on building assemblies and on wall sections- on money and leaks and settlement. This is not glamorous stuff. It will not quicken your heartbeat. It will not stir your soul. But the wall section is not the scale at which innovation works best for Nauru.

In this next phase of studies we are working at the scale where responsible innovation is more appropriate- in the configurations of the houses, in natural cooling, in security, in the relationship of a house to a street or a block or a neighbourhood or a garden or a park; in a reduced number of car trips, in greater independence for people without cars. I know what is coming this winter and you will be presented with unimaginable options that don’t currently exist on Nauru. But I would like to get there through a responsible and methodical process.

I think I have told you this before, but I live at two meters above sea level, on a migrating barrier island. I am chased from my home periodically by hurricanes. Water starts to dissolve our buildings the day we take occupancy. Salt corrodes. Humidity causes mold. It is a beautiful place but a hostile environment, and it has probably made me a little wary of experimentation because I see new products and new assemblies come and go out of fashion all the time. Maybe this is why I identified more readily with Al Ain than Abu Dhabi.

But we build for some really wealthy people, and we build for them - with stolid, unglamorous materials and simple assemblies - the same way we are recommending you build.

Kindest Regards,

Scott Merrill

Dear Ms. Marlene Moses, Special Advisor for the Higher Ground Initiative,

As you know, housing is a small part of a larger master planning effort led by Demetri Baches and Mallory Baches, of Metrocology LLC. We are glad to be started and look forward to a collaborative process that belies our physical separation from you. Our work with you will be part of a nearly year-long process but we hope we can finish the work on the houses in much less time. The master planners have a lot more work to do, and they will be able to use our work with you as they start to consider the size of lots, blocks and streets.

We have proposed a very specific way of working, but we wish to have reasonable flexibility as well as some structure to our efforts. We will have lots of questions for you and it is not yet clear how soliciting your advice will affect the process. Let’s start with a process that is easy enough to describe and easy enough to modify. SECTION