Nauru is the third smallest nation in the world, with the second smallest population, and remote as it is, the least visited country in the world. It was colonized by Germany, becoming a protectorate in 1888, and then after WWI was a protectorate of three countries from the British Empire that mined its high-quality phosphate deposits. It was occupied by Japan in WWII, and it received its independence in 1968 at the height of its production of phosphate. 

After its independence, and on the strength of its natural resources, it was, on a per capita basis, among the wealthiest countries in the world. Its wealth fund was subsequently squandered. Its phosphate has helped feed Australia and New Zealand, but all of its food is imported and high in calories, and so obesity and diabetes are common. 

Most water is desalinized sea water. Electricity is generated entirely from imported fuel. 38% of the workforce works for the government. There is a low-lying airstrip.  Small launches shuttle between sea going vessels and the shallow port. Phosphate is delivered to the holds of ships out beyond the reef by huge cantilevered cranes, the most memorable structures on the island. Anything imported – and everything is imported – is punishingly expensive.

The housing, subsidized by vanished wealth, is aging. As average household sizes inch up, domestic violence has risen. No industry looms to replace phosphate mining. Half the island’s revenue is from one of Australia’s controversial Immigrant Processing Centers. Australia, aware of its obligation to the island, offered to house the population on an Australian island. Nauruans declined to move.

Nauru’s inhabitants, many of whom still depend on fishing, live at low elevations on the island’s verdant perimeter, between rising seas and the escarpment forming its tabletop interior. The phosphate mines pockmark the entire topside. The landscape is remarkable. The phosphate lies between limestone pinnacles and the pinnacles remain, and the depleted mines look like the hoodoos in the Badlands of North Dakota or the slender granite intrusions of southern Utah. 

What’s really remarkable is that mining was conducted successfully and for a long time, with incredible inefficiency. Nauru’s phosphate mines are to Florida’s massive open phosphate mines, what West Virginia’s labor-intensive coal mines are to Wyoming’s surface strip mines. 

The Higher Ground Initiative (HGI) proposes to move the entire population of the island to the pitted and depleted interior. The phosphate mines are being mined again and will be remediated by chopping off the limestone pinnacles, grinding them down, and filling the low points, leaving a featureless, glaringly bright marl landscape that is nonetheless supposed to be a buildable and arable new landscape.

Economists hired by the HGI have modeled the economy’s prospects and have suggested that the county’s budget deficits might go to zero provided that solar energy draws down expenditures on imported fuels and provided that domestic food production replaces 20% of its food imports. It also presupposes that the Immigrant Processing Center remain as a principal source of the country’s revenue – impoundment as foreign aid.

The last time Nauru undertook a government housing program in the late eighties and early nineties, it could afford to underwrite about 30% of the cost of the housing. Even with the reduced import expenses the economists modeled for the island, there stands to be no money to subsidize housing now. 

We are part of a team hired by the Republic of Nauru, and under the guidance of the HGI, to re-plan the six square miles of the island’s interior. About a third of this would be dedicated to residential neighborhoods. 

The economists’ targets for domestic food production could theoretically be met with a little over a square mile of additional land. It is theoretical because the estimates assume topsoil and fresh water, both of which would require considerable investments.  Despite having fed the British empire, supplying twenty percent of its own food will be challenging and expensive. It remains unclear how much land would be required for solar to replace sufficient imports of fuel for generating electricity.

The government corporation that is extracting the last grudging phosphate deposits from the interior owns all the topside land. There is no real estate market to facilitate the transfer of property to citizens. There is no history of savings. There is no financial industry. Government housing programs of pre-fab housing have caused private construction and construction skills to atrophy.  

There is a real need for housing but there is no indication people will elect to leave the sea and the trees of the perimeter, or if relocation will be benignly coercive. One senses an inchoate wish on the part of decision makers to be transformational, somewhat heedless of the risks. Living topside looks a lot like exile.

Every profession tends to think of problems in terms of its own expertise. When a tsunami in the Indian Ocean kills an unconscionable number of people living at sea level, planners from all over the world descend to provide housing at higher elevations. Then people forsake the housing and move back to a shoreline that gives their life meaning. 

Nauru serves, in part, to disabuse a small group of us of the centrality of architecture and planning. Meanwhile, the consulting economists, undeterred, muse in their immutable slide presentation about the role of exports, digital economies and eco-tourism, like some touring band that can’t remember what city they are playing in.