In 2017, FAR decided to focus a great deal of its intellectual energies on a long-term analysis, assessment and re-imagination of the socio-technical ecology that defines Rapa Nui and its built form, in collaboration with the Pontificia Universidad Catolica of Santiago de Chile, the Municipality and the Provincial Government of the Isla de Pascua, and the Sociedad Agrícola y Servicios Isla de Pascua (SASIPA).

Of utmost significance here is the potential of the operation to facilitate the implementation of a full array of place-based scientific, physical, industrial, and planning activities that can show the world how small regions may provide for their building future by envisioning and enacting a circular economy appropriate to their locale.