Fog Farming

Fog Farming

FOG FARMING is a study of a hypothetical water farming infrastructure for the arid city of Luanda, Angola; using fog harvesting nets with varying capabilities.  An edited, improved (in drawings and writing) version will be published in the upcoming first edition of [Bracket] in winter 2009.  It can be seen at the website under the title Hydrating the Musseques.

Luanda, the fastest growing city in the world, is desperately short of clean water. Only one in six Luandan households has running water, forcing most of the inhabitants of the musseques (the vast slums that constitute the majority of Luanda’s land area) to depend on contaminated water brought by truck from rivers hours north and south of the city. The price of water in the musseques can be as high as 12 cents a gallon, a huge burden on a populace which lives on an average of $2 per person per day. In 2006, the worst African cholera epidemic in a decade devastated the musseques, killing 1600, spread by contaminated drinking water as well as contact with sewage.

FACT: What if water, already inextricable from agricultural farming processes, was itself farmed? Beyond the direct benefits a renewable source of fresh, clean water would provide Luanda, farming water seeds the city with potential. By establishing an infrastructure to effect the farming of water, one may farm landscapes, societies, production: a city. Farming water in parched terrain seems paradoxical, but an established process for doing so already exists: fog farming. Like most forms of farming, fog farming can be seen as a special instance of infrastructure and, as an infrastructure, it has both direct and indirect effects: it is directly responsible for condensing and collecting airborne moisture; but it also has many indirect effects on the growth and health of the urban system.

The fundamental inquiry of our project is a unique treatment of infrastructure, considering not just how its programmed function can enable positive development of some urban condition, but how the thing in itself, the system which enables that function, can have other, non-function-related (indirect) effects — and how they can be understood and utilized. Before exploring those indirect effects, though, a brief description of the techniques and requirements for fog farming may be helpful. This technology has been explored for several decades as a means to obtain potable water in arid environments, though until now it has been confined to rural locales, owing to problems with airborne particulate pollution.

FOG FARMING

A typical apparatus consists of a nylon or polypropylene mesh, at least a meter or two square, stretched across a metal or plastic frame, with condensed moisture dripping down the mesh into a collection pipe at the bottom of the net. The basic necessary conditions for the deployment of such an apparatus are an arid environment and strong fog. Such fogs are found primarily along particular ocean coasts (the Pacific coasts of Chile and Peru, the Atlantic Coasts of Namibia and Angola, or the Indian coast of the Arabian peninsula) where certain ocean currents produce atmospheric moisture which is then confined and concentrated by mountains.

Fog farming, then, can only be fully understood as an urban intervention if it is understood as performing ‘infrastructurally’ — as having effects on the urban system that extend far beyond the direct or spatial, to the alteration of streams and flows — liquid, capital, human, traffic, and so on. Thus we have sought not merely to provide a form of farming that meets a need for water, but also to understand how, in placing an infrastructure that would meet that need, we might also alter the streams and flows of the urban system for the better.

Urban Intervention

THANK YOU 4 WATCHIN

On the arid periphery of the city, fog farming would serve to seed the future of the city. Though the practice is deplorable, it is unlikely that the government will stop clearing informal settlements in the center of the city, so the periphery will likely continue to swell with a constant mixture of slum dwellers expelled from their homes and new arrivals from the hinterlands of Angola. Expanses farmed for fog would be gradually impregnated with nutrient-rich water, cutting down on dust storms, prompting the growth of farms and eventually settlements based around this infrastructure. Through farming water, we farm landscape, farm city, farm future communities.