Posted on by Matt Williams

Winning Urban Farming Ideas for Mars!

Credit: Mars City Design

If humans plan to go to live and work beyond Earth someday, they will need technologies that allow for sustainable living in alien environments. This is especially true of Mars, which is extremely cold, dry, and subject to more radiation than we are used to. On top of that, it also takes six to nine months to send spacecraft there, and that’s every two years when Earth and Mars are closest to each other in their orbits.

As such, settling on the Red Planet will require some serious creativity!

This is the purpose of Mars City Design (the Mars City®), an innovation and design platform founded by architect and filmmaker Vera Mulyani. Every year since its inception, this organization has hosted the Mars City Design Challenges, where students from around the world come together with industry experts to produce architectural designs for living on Mars (what Mulyani calls “Marchitecture”).

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Posted on by Matt Williams

Ideas for Sustainable Cities and Urban Farming… on Mars?

Credit: MCD
“The core essence of Mars City Design is —not to repeat the same mistakes that we did to our planet. The hope to start a new design for living on Mars, every single thing needs to have a sustainable answer within the big picture, of the regenerative circle of life and of the product itself. All things need an exit plan that allows them to be reusable or repurposed. That can hopefully inspire change on Earth.”

-Vera Mulyani (Vera Mars), Founder/CEO Mars City Design

Once the stuff of science fiction, the possibility that humans could establish a permanent settlement on Mars now appears to be a genuine possibility. While doing so represents a major challenge and there are many hurdles that still need to be overcome, the challenge itself is inspiring some truly creative solutions. But what is especially interesting is how these same solutions can also address problems here on Earth.

This is especially clear where the Mars City Design Challenges are concerned. This annual competition was founded with the purpose of inspiring innovative ideas that could lead to sustainable living on Mars. For this year’s challenge, “Urban Farming for Extreme Environment,” Mars City Design and its founder (Vera Mulyani) are looking for designs that incorporate urban farming to support a colony of 100 people.

Continue reading “Ideas for Sustainable Cities and Urban Farming… on Mars?”