Cloud Gardens is a grassroots geoengineering proposal for maintaining the land-atmospheric water cycle in the West Mediterranean Basin through land-use planning and cloud-formation through evapotranspiration. Taking the Río Palancia valley in northern Valencia as its pilot site, the project brings together community dialogue, scenario planning, scientific modelling and a game-engine narrative tool. These components establish the Cloud Garden as both a public space and a protocol for cultivating, stewarding and re-imagining the collective relationship between land, water and atmosphere.
Location
Proposal
01 Hydrological context
On the western Mediterranean coast sit the historical rice-growing lands of Valencia – situated between the foothills of el Toro and the wetlands that hug the coastline. Once characterized by careful cultivation and inherited water management practices, the natural wetlands of the past were systematically drained and replaced by fields of citrus. Like many regions in Europe during the 19th-20th century, wetlands were seen both as sources of disease as well as opportunity for economic reinvention. Large scale alterations of land use can have drastic consequences on atmospheric dynamics. Valencia has long lived with the legacies of flooding, evident in the waterless river valleys that sculpt everyday infrastructure. Long-term atmospheric monitoring has confirmed that the combination of climate change and land use change is making floods more intense and more frequent. The conversion of natural vegetation to industrial cropland reduces moisture and increases heat. What was once a predictable cycle of summer rain has succumbed to a system trapped by a state of movement from the sea to land with conditions too dry and hot to maintain moisture within its valleys. Over the course of an entire summer season, sea air is pushed too high into the atmosphere, and its build up leads to the formation of catastrophic flood-making clouds, sometimes kilometers high. In our Anthropocene these realities are all too common, built from our manufactured, homogenous, water-starved lands that can alter the hydrological dynamics of large regions and produce nearly irreversible and undesirable climatic regimes. Is it possible to stabilise the atmospheric system by changing our lands once again?
02 Problem
Our prototype is situated across the entire Palancia river valley, weaving together landscapes often seen as detached, and follows the river path from the foothill mountains around El Toro, through the valley and where it meets the sea at the port of Sagunto. Historically, this hydrological system has been repeatedly reconfigured. What appears as natural variation in the terrain alludes to moments where water is slowed through terraces, redirected through irrigation channels, extracted through aquifers. Reading these interventions simultaneously we begin to register the river as an expanded geoengineered system. The valley becomes a site of exchange between the surface, subsurface extraction, and atmosphere. Our scientific partners at the Basque Centre for Climate Change have established a meso-scale model of the atmospheric flows of the West Mediterranean, which has demonstrated that vegetation loss and decreasing evapotranspiration has led to the gradual decoupling between the terrestrial and atmospheric water cycles. The answer to this problem is both simple and deeply complex. How can we develop economically viable and sustainable ways of stewarding the land and maintaining the water cycle through evapotranspiration? How can we negotiate consensus around atmospheric stability as a common good, across complex stakeholder and intergenerational horizons? What can we learn by looking to the past, and through the collective practice of reimagining future water-land configurations that recouple our water cycles?
03 The cloud garden
The Cloud Garden is our prototype to address these questions. As a process of collectively sculpting the clouds through how we work the land, this infrastructural intervention combines social, material and computational tools. From zen gardens to colonial botany, land art to continental-scale afforestation, gardens and gardening have long served as experimental interfaces for environmental, scientific and philosophical speculation. In this context, the Cloud Garden operates as a narrative-driven hydrological intervention: a speculative garden designed to stage relationships between land, water, and atmosphere as something that can be collectively observed, imagined, and laboured towards. Within our grassroots geoengineering prototype we hope to align visions between the scientific understanding of regional atmospheric scenarios with community perspectives. Through both physical experimentation and digital simulation, the project proposes situated gestures that might contribute to reconnecting not only land use and hydrological cycles, but stakeholders and multi-level governance. The intention is to foster transscalar forms of resilience, highlighting how responses to climate instability emerge across diverse scales in the Palancia Valley, from the seed selection of the farmer, through urban planning strategies approved by the Valencian Generalitat, to community owned and managed land by Agro’s activists.
04 Methodology
Our methodology operates across three interconnected phases. First, a space of gathering. Working with BC3 and their established network of stakeholders, we plan to facilitate a space for dialogue and negotiation, exploring local perspectives around food, land cultivation and governance to foster trust and mutual understanding. Second, a digital simulation of the landscape, in which stories, scenarios and speculations developed through iterative co-production can be made accessible. Third, a physical garden, to cultivate long-term and local vegetation that restores and encourages historic summer rains in the region. The Cloud Garden would function as a work of land art, a community space designed to research and promote techniques for how land sculpts the sky within future imaginaries. Through shared knowledge, scientific research and negotiation, the ambition of the cloud garden is to establish a distributed planting protocol. This replicable framework, rooted in atmospheric science and environmental management, informs the selection of site, participants and garden design.
05 The Eagle Nest
To interface between the physical and the digital, part of our methodology includes the translation of two-dimensional field drawings into digital three-dimensional sculptural objects. In this digital space, we populate the terrain with sounds and visuals, creating a platform for exploring and sharing collective futures from the perspectives of community and industry. Erik, a volunteer at La Marjal d’Almenara, shared with us his methods for adapting to the challenges of biodiversity loss, drawing a diagram of a sea eagle nest he helped build in the marsh.
06 The Oak and Truffle, an existing positive loop
In the foothills of the Palancia Valley, María José of BC3 introduced us to existing social-ecological initiatives built around truffles and oak trees, showing how agriculture has adapted in response to climate and global supply change. From citrus farms to truffles growing among the mycelia at the roots of oak trees, a sustainable mode of land stewardship emerges. Drawings and audio recordings function as digital artefacts that are continuously adapted and iterated upon, expanding a common understanding of the site.
07 Cloud Garden as Protocol
Concretely, we aim for a pilot project of 9–12 months in which to lay the groundwork of field research, community dialogue and gatherings, and scientific and economic research. We would develop the social and analytical tools for each step of its implementation, from archiving atmospheric narratives in the digital garden, to building visually explorable stakeholder scenarios, assessing economic prospects and identifying strategic land sites where interventions can be tested. Gatherings will inform decisions regarding site selection, planting strategies and prospective landscape design, exploring how small-scale interventions could contribute to restoring water retention processes within the territory. Simultaneously, the project seeks to build a local team capable of sustaining the initiative, so that over time the role of the initiating institutions progressively diminishes and the garden becomes a locally-run space, a question of both culture and economy. Beyond the Palancia pilot, tools and methodologies may evolve into protocols that can be adapted to other Spanish wetland and hydrologically fragile territories, as well as across the wider Mediterranean region. As additional sites emerge, a network of Cloud Gardens could operate as a distributed observatory and ecological archive, documenting environmental change, community knowledge, and situated adaptation practices.
