Arranging on Mars is not easy and requires a lot of creativity. That is the purpose of Mars City Design: to build a Mars City with architectural innovation that incorporates Urban Farming that will ensure food security on the future colony of Mars.
Each year the Mars City® platform founded by architect and filmmaker Vera Mulyani hosted the Mars City Design Challenge. It is a program where students from all over the world come together with industry experts to make a “Marchitecture” for the future colony of Mars.
In 2020, their goal was Urban Farming, where participants need to think of strategies that would allow Martians to prosper in the future.
Vera Mulyani explained that the main goal of establishing a colony and planning an urban farm on the red planet is to prosper and not just survive, which means that infrastructure should better than people that will help people’s long-term sustainability. She also said that success means coming together in terms of innovation on Mars.
Below are the top five winners of the 2020 Urban Farming competition, which is divided into several categories, as reported World today:
Justin’s Food Production System
Under the Mars Agricultural Engineering department, Justin’s Mars Farm has won along with three other entries. It is a concept by Justin Pourkaveh who is a fluid systems thermal engineer in commercial aerospace.
His concept is a food production system made of interconnected models that provide a growing space of arable land for growing food. It also has windows and is designed to regulate humidity, solar interference and thermal conditions. It makes indoor farming a reality on the red planet, an urban farming method used here on Earth.
MarSpine
Architectural engineer Mohamed Emad won first place under the Design Department with a MarSpine design. It was inspired by the Voronois structure of the lilypad. When you look up it would look like the lower side of a lilypad, a spine in the middle that surrounds the structure in two with the ribs extending to the edge.
The MarSpine would be 3D printed from regolith and pre-assembled with carbon nanotubes to make the structure stable and flexible. It is then covered with fiberglass cloth to reduce them from air dust and additional UV protection to ensure that the temperature inside the structure remains stable.
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Sprout
Guiseppe Calabrese in Australia and Italy won first place under the Marchitecture Division for his Sprout design. The idea for this structure comes from the idea of the agricultural experiences here on Earth, where the natural environment is destroyed and creates more waste.
Sprout serves as a solution to this problem as it offers a system that converts waste into a sustainable and energy efficient agricultural process.
Barchan City
Under the Design Department, Dubai (UAE) is Khaled AlLabban’s young architect Barchan City design won third place. The structure is named after one of Mars’ most famous features, the Barchan Fort located in the lower Acidalia Plantilla region.
The main focus of the structure is for planting, in which it provides cultivation facilities, as well as dwellings and workplaces. It also offers the services needed to maintain them. “The next step is towards a fully functioning, independent and plant-centric community,” AlLabban said.
Colony of Mars 1
Colony of Mars 1 design won second place under the Mars Agricultural Engineering category. It is designed by Mars City Ambassador Thomas Lagarde and postdoc aerospace engineer and Martian environmentalist Yulia Akisheva.
According to them, Mars Colony 1 aims to provide an innovative view of crop selection and concept work that could be used on Earth. In addition, Mars Colony 1 increases the potential safety of the crew with its radiation shelter and ascent model.
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