How Do We Plan For Cities on Mars?

Thanks to a Kickstarter funded project, planners, architects, engineers, and others will now have the opportunity to develop what could become prototypes for future martian cities. Vas Panagiotopoulos of Quartz reports that a multi-day workshop put on by the Mars City Foundation this September at the University of Southern California will invite innovators to plan for cities that could accommodate up to 1,000 people. The project is the brainchild of architect and "marschitect" Vera Mulyani.

The workshop, whose speakers include Jim Erickson, project manager of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover, and Madhu Thangavelu, a professor at the Viterbi School of Engineering, will also be attended by Apollo 11 pilot Buzz Aldrin.

... Mulyani says her team’s goal is to look far ahead, to examine “what happens after the first city, what happens after we have a base.” She also sees the purity of Mars as an opportunity to think long-term, something we didn’t do (and arguably still aren’t doing) on Earth.

Panagiotopoulos reports that the Mars City Design team will select three city-design proposals from among 25 finalists to 3D print as test runs in the Mojave desert. The finalists include projects that focus on vertical farming, an indoor river system and a system that uses elements in martian soil to create oxygen, water, energy, and nutrition.