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
Urban
streams and flows of the urban system for the
better.

Intervention
 THANK
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

YOU
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

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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.

WATCHIN