SUMMARY NOTES

Dear Ms. Marlene Moses,

The following points will be developed in greater detail:

■ The first two phases of the work on housing can be done prior to having a site plan.

■ This first phase of work will look at how various efforts have approached building on the island in the recent past.

■ The recurring emphasis is on relative costs and on how money is distributed throughout the construction budget. A secondary emphasis will be on upfront costs and ongoing costs.

■ The report is organized by building assemblies, from the substrate and foundation to the roofs.

■ People have had, and will continue to have, honest differences of opinion about the best way to build because the considerations and the tradeoffs are often subtle.

■ This report is based on framing the considerations that bear on each decision and not how these considerations are weighted. The Steering Committee and the Housing Committee will need to help us with this, and they have been very helpful.

■ The second phase of work, starting in mid-October and running through December, focuses on programming - the size and number of rooms, the phasing and expansion of houses, and the sizes of lots.

■ A major goal of the phasing effort will be to address a range of needs, now and over time, with a limited number of house types. This work will affect master planning this winter.

■ Three primary sources will be used for the first phase of work: A 1994 NAC study by architect David Whitfield; the 2011 RON Census, and the 2020 Smart House drawings.

■ The success of the HGI program rests on the quality of the substrate left after remediation of the phosphate mining. Housing and infrastructure will require good bearing and drainage. Differential settlement will strain foundations.

■ Building configurations and the efficiency of building envelopes are the single most important determinants of costs. They should be given weight, but thinner houses also improve quality of life.

■ Nauru has used prefabricated housing in the past. The 1994 NAC report cites a number of problems experienced with prefabricated housing, and prefabricated housing goes against Nauru’s wishes to develop the building trades.

■ A range of foundation types, and their advantages and disadvantages, have been described in detail.

■ There is an island preference for concrete slabs and block walls, which coincides with island resources, with construction durability, and with the determination to further develop the building trades.

■ Wall openings are the most expensive part of the walls, and so to a degree, economy and cross ventilation are difficult to reconcile.

■ Insulation is rare, and sustainability may be better thought of in terms of durability than in terms of thermal loss across walls, roofs and floors.

■ There are alternative ways to frame and sheath roofs, giving them more lateral strength and helping them protect more against rain but the current way of building roofs likely won’t change because of the cost of materials.

■ There are strong incentives to reduce up-front costs as much as possible, even if it means incurring inordinate maintenance costs later, or if housing, as an asset drops in value over time.

■ The HGI could distinguish itself if policy could recalibrate some of these short-term decisions so that Nauruans could afford houses built to be an asset after 20 or 30 years.

There are to be four phases to our work. The first two are to be finished by the end of 2021, and the other two will unfold in the early months of 2022. These are the four proposed phases: a) Precedent Studies b) Program Diagrams c) Aggregation Studies d) Revisions and Final Presentation Drawings

These phases are in order, buwt they aren’t completely categorical, and they will overlap some on the schedule. We may start work on the next phase while we wait for feedback on the previous phase. Here is a further description of each phase.

We can start this work without waiting for mapping or planning studies. It is a phase that requires close communication with the members of the Steering Committee, and those who helped develop the Smart House.

A conventional precedent study will be difficult. There have been plenty of housing models since about 1949 but they are not well documented, they have not always held up well over time, and they don’t always reflect modern housing preferences.

There are precedents for different types of foundations, walls, windows, and roofs. There are arguments in favor of most any basic way of building because they each give slightly different weight to all the considerations. The precedent study will lay out these choices and the considerations for making decisions about each assembly. The Steering Committee will then have to make decisions based on how much weight to give each consideration.

Most everything will come down to how money is spent and moved from one part of the construction budget to another, and to finding the right balance between cost and effect. This does not preclude elective add on costs, which we will study in phase 2.

This phase will draw from several documents we have in hand, and from any additional information the Steering Committee can bring to our attention. We will start with the substrate - the remediated mines - and work up through basic assemblies, from foundations to roofs.

SECTION 1.B

Establishing the right number of rooms and the size of each room will be important early on. We are encouraged by the affinity between the valuable information in the 2011 RON Census and the plans of the Smart House from last year. The precedent phase should summarize these affinities and help establish a program.

The program diagram phase should demonstrate how variants and alternate configurations can help capture the full range of information from the census which shows that bedroom count, as an example, ranges fairly broadly by household.

Post-World War II housing types ranged from 67 square meters up to about 160 square meters. The Welcome Homes of 1987-1988 fell within a much narrower range of 111-121 square meters. The four bedroom variant of the Smart House is squarely in the middle of this range.

Apparently, a lot of Nauruans start with the overall size of the house they think they can afford and then back into the room count and room size. This is a reasonable way to program house prototypes. The ideal programming process will work from both ends - adding up room needs and deriving an overall size, and starting with an overall size and backing into a room count and room sizes. We will try to do both.

In this phase we should be gauging the need for variants, elective add-ons and phasing for household growth. There may be a need for a very small house, smaller than the two bedroom variant of the Smart House, that can be added onto as families grow and incomes increase. These studies can be undertaken before we have a site plan.

This phase requires some preliminary lot and block sizes and configurations, which we should have toward the end of 2021. In this phase we will populate the blocks and the streets of the first phase master plan with the variants we study in phase 2. This phase requires the closest collaboration with the planning and the sizing of lots. It is the phase in which the variety of the work of phase 2 will become evident.

It will also be more clear in this phase what the average lot size, and the range of lot sizes need to be. This is the phase in which we will consider the lot beyond the house itself- the private outdoor spaces - and the streets. The relationship of the rooms and the yards will be more important, as well. Privacy and security will become more important issues. We will want the houses to contribute to the streets as well, without compromising their security.

The drawings for this phase will include block plans, roof plans, aerials, elevations, and eye level perspectives, including street perspectives.

This is a period in which all work can be reviewed by the Steering Committee, with the benefit of a little more time. It is assumed that previous approvals will be revisited in detailed but not fundamental ways. It is a period in which we can do our final drawings.

The beginning of the process in the first phase, Section 1.0, will be very fine grained and methodical, and maybe a little tedious for people who are not responsible for building the houses. We will go from the foundation to the ridges of the house looking at different options. The houses need to be simple and durable. Additive options and elective assemblies will introduce more variety during the programming phase. A single configuration won’t address the full range of needs reflected in the census and so we will assess how flexibility might be introduced at reasonable costs. The Smart House is a great example of a plan that can accommodate two or four bedrooms.

Likely the needs of a given household might change over time and so phasing in changes or additions will be part of what we look at in the second phase. Generally, the promise of the work will start to show in this second phase, but it will only be fully apparent when we have a varied site we can drop houses into.

We need simple buildings that vary in a fairly narrow range in order to keep costs down. But everyone rightly wants variety and richness throughout a neighbourhood. It’s not that difficult to reconcile these two things. Simple individual houses can be laid out for a range of lots sizes, and lot configurations can vary, and block sizes can vary and streets can vary, all without additional cost. The richness and variety will come later in the third phase from the aggregation of simple house types.

We will start with the benefit of three documents. We will benefit from as much additional information as we can get and hope the committee will bring additional documents to our attention. We are especially interested in the range of post war housing, and the Welcome House of the late 1980’s. It would help to have plans and walls sections, if they exist, and it would help to know how various materials and assemblies weathered over time.

The documents on which we will rely most heavily at the beginning are: a) A n NAC paper by an Australian architect named David Whitfield, from 1994 b) The 2011 Republic of Nauru Census

Whitfield co-wrote this paper with an economist named Bob Carstairs. We like this document for two reasons. Whitfield is methodical and detail oriented and very practical. Carstairs contributes extended considerations of costs. Their priorities generally conform with what we know about your preferences to source as many things on island as possible, to limit shipping costs, and to train trades locally. They contribute some skepticism about pre-fab assemblies shipped in and assembled by off island trades. The report has some valuable information on programming. We agree with most all their conclusions except for the proper lot and block sizes, which we think are excessive for the likely number of houses we need to accommodate on a fixed parcel in the first phase.

Whitfield and Carstairs obviously did not have the benefit of the 2011 Census, but they explicitly recommended that a survey be undertaken on family income, number of family units, persons per household, and existing housing conditions. The 2011 Census answers most all of this. Like their own study, the census is fine grained, and it contains a wealth of information.

The survey is unique in the attention it gives to the houses and households of Nauru. Along with the Smart House and post war precedents, the census will help give a basis for the programming of the houses- the list of rooms and their sizes. The census captures a broader range of household needs than any one design can, and addressing this range will be a major focus on the second and third phases of work.

The Whitfield document was a text. The census relied heavily on graphics. The Smart House initiative has incredibly detailed recommendations for how to build. If it did not draw directly from the Census of 2011, it is consistent with it. It is flexible and will be a model for our program and phasing alternates. It has an efficient building envelope - the ratio of envelope area to enclosed area - which is the most important determinant of cost.

We have received some historical photos from Mark Jariobka and from the housing committee. Whitfield describes a series of model homes since 1949. To this point we have no plans for these models, but the information we have on overall square footage from these prototypes is helpful.

SECTION 1.B

(Regarding additional sources for precedents: Note that Whitfield references modern housing types with great specificity. He references housing types 1 through 7, the size of the small type 1-67 square meters - and the subsequent growth in the size of the types; the type IV which is two stories and 163 square meters, and typically four bedroom but sometimes 5. It would help to find these types. There are no references to years but they are apparently just post-war programs.

There is a reference to a housing program of prefabricated kit houses started in 1987/8 and built in Australia and New Zealand. These houses were between 111 and 121 square meters, excluding porches. Porches were 1.8 to 2 meters wide. Whitfield cites lots of complaints about these houses, but we need to know more about both programs. The Smart House is closer to the size of the Welcome Houses of the late 80’s and early 90’s.)

Part of the method in this phase will be to collate comments from these different sources. So for example, historical photos show model house programs with a range of foundation types. Whitfield acknowledges a range of possible foundation types but recommends slabs on grade for government programs. The Smart House has a hybrid foundation of piers and crawlspaces under the front rooms of the houses, and a matt foundation and a raised slab under the bedroom wing. The precedent study should help foster a decision between these choices

This first phase of work will characterize the advantages and disadvantages of each type. The Committee will assign their own weight to the considerations. There is always a range of reasonable options.

Another example would be the percentage of openings in the walls. Whitfield recommends a very high percentage of openings - 50 to 80%. Most of the money in a house is in the exterior envelope and openings are the most expensive part of the envelope. But openings admit daylight and afford cross ventilation, which was Whitfield’s focus. The Smart House has a much lower percentage of openings, probably because costs were given more weight. Likely Whitfield’s recommendation is too high.

Ventilation, whether it is through the walls or under the floors, is highly desirable but it is costly and every increase in cost will make housing less affordable or require smaller or fewer rooms. So we will frame these kinds of issues, and in phase 2 we will provide examples of a range of percentage of openings, and let Nauruans find the right balance of two inarguably desirable things.

This will be different from most precedent studies. Most modern Nauru precedents will fall short by some important measure, and so historical and current examples will be helpful in thinking about the performance of materials in the climate over time, or the capability of the trades, or the relative advantages of prefabrication versus site built housing, but we will need to rethink building on the island from the substrate on up.

If there are not enough precedents in Nauru, we will consider how people build in similar climates. We are half a world away from you, but we live and work on a migrating barrier island of sand and we live and work at two meters above sea level. We have high humidity. Water starts to dissolve our buildings from the day we take occupancy.

The heat blisters dark painted surfaces. High rainfall will migrate through our masonry walls if they don’t have a vapor barrier on the outside. We have seasonal breezes that shift from season to season. We build defensively and will bring this same conservative attitude toward building in Nauru.

But there are unprecedented things about Nauru. We will inherent unusual, remediated mining sites. Environmental considerations are changing rapidly. There is a history of health issues in the 1930’s. Cesspools are still common. There will be modern security issues. Nauruans build with little or no insulation, and plywood is too expensive to use. And so there will have to be alternate ways to provide resistance to wind loads, and other ways to keep water from penetrating the roof.

There may be more reason to look forward to the planning process this winter than to look back on housing precedents. The first phase planning will provide opportunities that don’t currently exist on the island, and so it is important to anticipate the advantages of attractive public streets and secure private yards. And it will be important to create variety based on minor variants of limited housing types, and on variations in siting and orientation and entry. It will be important to provide for changes over time, and it will be important to accommodate a range of family sizes and numbers of generations served by a single house.

The 2011 Republic of Nauru Census has figures on household size by district; on head of household by gender; on the percentage of owners and renters, on single and multi-family

SECTION 1.B housing; on the age of housing; on the number of rooms, and the number of bedrooms; on how many households do or don’t have a dining room, or a kitchen and on whether bathrooms or kitchens are shared with other households.

The census has statistics on construction; on the percentage of concrete block houses versus wood houses; on metal and asbestos roofs; on guttering and gutter materials; on how any houses have downspouts and what percentage are connected to water storage and even the capacity of water storage tanks and what they are made of and whether they are shared with otherhouseholds.

On those dependent on catchment water versus desalinized water; on those who can depend on freshwater; on the use of gas or electricity or wood for cooking; on the types of toilets and whether they are shared; on the percentage of households on a sewer system versus on septic or cesspool; on the percentage with internet; on those with phones or cell phones, or refrigerators or freezers or microwaves or air conditioners or ceiling fans.

This census information will help with programming and with assemblies. Whitfield’s report is full of interesting programming guidance. He cites housing programs for which we have no plans but lists sizes and conventions for square meters per person, which he thinks is twice as high on Nauru - at 13 square meters per person - than on other Pacific islands. He mentions the Welcome Houses at 111-121 square meters. He mentions an older series of seven house types ranging from 67 square meters (type 1) to 163 square meters (type 4 with 4-5 bedrooms).

For comparison the one story two bedroom Smart House is about 75 square meters, just barely larger than the postwar, type 1 houses, and the two story four bedroom version is about 115 square meters, or right at the size of the Welcome Houses of the 1980’ and 1990’s, but smaller than the older two story, four bedroom type 4.

The Smart House captures two different bedroom scenarios with admirable economy and efficiency. But the census shows household room and bedroom counts beyond these two scenarios. The programming phase will generate a flexible and phaseable range of programming options. These options would allow households to stay in the same house, should moving prove difficult, even as their income or household size may change.

Since kitchen and dining rooms are relatively fixed, according to the census, the principal programming variable will be bedroom count, but even for a given number of bedrooms, the configuration can vary. With identical bedroom counts, houses can be one story or two. They can be straight in line layouts, or L’s or U shapes. They can be one room deep or two rooms deep.

Their narrow end or their broad side can face the street. They can enter off courtyards or off streets. They could share a courtyard with households with whom they share toilets or kitchens or they could be the only units that face smaller courtyards. There can be very small starter houses for younger people or people with no credit. These houses could be expandable or, if a market for houses is in place, they can be sold over and over to similar households.

The census does not seem to address porches. Porches are a luxury, but they appear in a number of current and historic house types. Porches could be built with the house or added later. They could face courtyards so they are secure. Balconies on stacked plans could face the street. They could have wood posts or masonry piers. They could have their own roofs or be under a second floor with rooms.

The census cannot address things that don’t currently exist in Nauru and so house types might anticipate certain aggregations that could form courtyards, or line small mid-block streets, or have common end walls that can form rows of buildings. Densities could increase toward the centres of neighbourhoods and decrease toward the perimeters, so that lot sizes might vary naturally. Stacked house types could line squares or plazas and one stories spread over large areas.

The programming phase will be conducted before we have a site or a master plan and the programming and the configuration studies might help inform lot and block sizes. Whitfield suggested lots of 300 square meters and 10,000 square meter blocks. There will be a range of lot and block sizes that the programming phase has to anticipate but with the limited availability of land it seems likely that many lots and blocks will be smaller than this.

Since World War II housing programs have been developed without regard to a context. The programming and configurations studies of phase 2, will anticipate a context of varied lots, blocks, and streets.

(Note that we have heard more about the correlation of crime and density than about health and density. We need to know more about health concerns. Disease has devasted the island at times, including tuberculosis in the 1930’s. While Whitfield is clear that we do not know if housing conditions contributed to epidemics, he cites Australian studies that recommend against compounds housing extended families, and studies that recommend single family dwellings. This is probably why he suggests larger lots than we will likely deliver. The 2011 Census shows that there are still a number of people using cesspools and so we need to address concerns that correlate health and density as much as concerns about crime and density.)

SECTION 1.B