MARS_architects

MARS Architects, Shanghai, an award winning design studio with twenty years of experience in Asia and buildings realized in Europe and Central America. MARS Architects has a strong focus on sustainable planning and has developed over a dozen integrated planning projects across Asia. Recent projects include the winning masterplan for a new town in Wuhan and the sustainable master plan of an IT district in Chengdu. For the coming year MARS has been commissioned a regional planning and low impact development project for Central Java and Borobudur. The www.Metrojava2045.org project uses big data the objective is to re-conceptualise Java’s dense desakota landscape and mediate between top-down national planning projects and bottom-up village level incentives. Results to be presented in August 2022 at the World Planning Forum in Bali. Dr. Mars is the director of the Dynamic City Foundation (DCF), a non-profit research platform investigating rapid urbanization in Asia. Mars is the author of the book The Chinese Dream - a society under construction (010 Publishers, N. Mars, A. Hornsby, R’dam 2008). This multifaceted tome on Chinese urbanization is said to have inspired the central theme (中国梦 the Chinese Dream) of the twelve Five Year Plan, three years later. Mars has a PhD from RMIT, graduated on topic of urban evolution. He is a lecturer at the China Academy of Art, a BMW Guggenheim Lab fellow, INK fellow, and guest editor of Urban China magazine. Coming year Mars will publish his third book "Manifesto of Mistakes - urban solutions for the new world", this ecocity manual rethinks the fundamental principles of the urban discipline, to arrive at a site-sensitive and process-driven urbanism.