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Mars is something of a paradox. In theory, it has more land than any nation on Earth. Indeed, it has as much land as the entirety of Earth. In the early years of colonisation, land will be free. For a long time to come, it will be cheap. But aside from mining rights, it is also worthless. Nothing can grow in the dry, toxic soil surrounded by vacuum. And a house built on the surface of Mars would be uninhabitable as it would contain no air. We could build cities as a network of pressurised buildings, each surrounded by vacuum. But that would mean donning spacesuits to move between buildings or having pressurised passageways, which will be single point failures. Humans also seem to prefer open air environments that provide a sense of space. I think it most likely that city districts will be built as single pressurised enclosures, with non-pressurised buildings within. District enclosures will be connected by underground, pressurised passageways. This allows the city to grow over time, by adding more modular districts.
Land within the enclosure will be expensive. This is inevitable, as we must construct a pressurised enclosure around it. This could be a tensile structure, like a dome. Or it could be a gravity pressure vessel, using the weight of an overbearing mass of soil to counterbalance internal pressure. But either way, habitable space on Mars requires no small amount of engineering. When living space is expensive, the architecture should make the most efficient use of it possible. For small spaces, no more than a few hundred metres across, we don't need cars or even bycycles to move people and goods within an urban district. All transportation within will be by foot, with perhaps handcarts used to transport heavier and bulky goods over the short distances within districts. This is an opportunity as much as a challenge.
Cities were built in this way for thousands of years before the car ruined the urban landscape with cancerous urban sprawl. In the modern city, far more land is devoted to cars than to buildings. This has expanded the footprint of cities, to the point where they are so large that they are inaccessible to a man on foot. This has led to a form of cancer. The more unpleasant and sprawled the urban environment became, the more people desired to escape it and the more they needed motorised transportation to navigate it. In the race to achieve infinite personal mobility, mankind built urban environments that are a grim dystopia that everyone is desperate to escape from. This created a positive feedback that could only be exhausted by depletion of resources. The US took this further than any other nation, because its resources and land area provided no natural breaks. The more unpleasant the environment became, the more the demand for transportation grew, as people desired to live outside of it, but still needed the income it provided. At no point were the people involved prepared or able to realuse that they were the problem.
The cities of the Netherlands are unique in the fact that there was insufficient land to allow this cancer to spread very far. Dutch cities have preserved their preindustrial pedestrian character. The bycycle has improved mobility within the limited space available, but cities lacked the space for cancerous urban sprawl in the way that American cities did. So Dutch cities focussed on improving the limited environments that they had. The UK is part way between the Netherlands and the US in terms of the amount of land available. As a result, the cancer of urban sprawl started, but never went as far as it was able to in the US. With far fewer resources and far less land, the Netherlands has succeeded in building livable urban environments that Britain can only aspire to and Americans can only dream of. This makes Dutch cities a perfect case study for the development of Martian cities, where habitable land will similarly be constrained. Martian cities will be compact and pedestrian. I raise this thread in an attempt to explore how Martian cities will develop within the constraints imposed by the Martian environment.
Last edited by Calliban (2025-11-05 15:33:10)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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This post is reserved for an Index to posts that may be contributed by NewMars members.
It seems to me that this topic has significant growth potential. The companion topics with images of the Netherlands should inspire comparison as readers imagine what Martian Cities might be like.
This topic offers a number of photographs of the country: https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=11069
Pictures of Sweden and Norway: https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=11131
Index:
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The idea of walking in space suits are not the open feeling of being under a protective dome.
Or walking in that of a under ground world in subway tunnels.
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I have suggested before that hexagonal blocks would be a good design for a Lunar city. Can fit a circular pressure wall sandwiched between two layers of radiation shielding, and the blocks tesselate so the city can be expanded without creating expanses of empty space between blocks. Some blocks allocated as parks. Can be different heights -- imagine a central block being redeveloped with a tower.
Use what is abundant and build to last
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The New Urbanism movement was founded in the United States in the 1990s, by people who had grown tired of the car-centric lifestyle that exists everywhere in America. The arrival of the car utterly ruined American cities. They became places that everyone wanted to get away from. Europe was spared the worst of this vandalism by a mixture of historical asset inertia and lack of space to build very spread out cities.
http://www.newurbanism.org/newurbanism.html
Whoever wrote the New Urbanism website dragged a lot of their personal politics into it, which I think is a shame. None the less, the value of compact, carfree towns and cities, is amply demonstrated by the site.
Another excellent web resource is Carfree Cities by Crawford.
https://www.carfree.com/fes/index.html
Crawford develops a city architecture that achieves pedestrianisation within districts, with rail travel working between districts. In the referenced section, he talks about the grand medina in Fes. This is the largest intact medieval city in North Africa. It is entirely carfree. The streets are too narrow to allow even bycycles. Approximately 150,000 people live in the medina, which has an area of 300 hectares, or only slightly over one square mile in area. That is about 20 square metres land area per inhabitant. This is very dense and is made to feel even more cramped by the low rise buildings of the medina.
Last edited by Calliban (2025-11-09 18:01:53)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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US cities are also very far appart requiring speed to travel the 30 minute to 1 hour of dsistance.
Walking speed of 2.5 mph is sort of typical for how unfit most are.
Myself I live 4 to 5 miles to the near by city and towns so a rould trip take half a day.
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Addressing the point made by SpaceNut. Ultimately, it is transportation of people, goods and wastes, that limits the geographical size of a city. I found this article to be enlightening.
https://www.d5render.com/posts/walkable … ples-guide
For an entirely pedestrian city to be practical, it must be possible to walk from any one part to any other part in a reasonable amount of time. This is one of the reasons why preindustrial cities tend to be quite small and compact. Ancient Rome is a notable exception. But in general, inhabitants must be able to access all of the amenities of the city in easy walking distance of where they live. In practice, this tends to result in pedestrian urban areas being very built up, with narrow streets and compact terrace houses. Amsterdam, Venice and the North African medina towns demonstrate this.
The grand medina in Fez, houses some 150,000 people, along with thousands of commercial businesses and small manufacturers, all on just 1 square mile of land. Population density is 550 people per hectare, which amounts to some 18 square metres per person. What makes this even more incredible, is that the mud based buildings are rarely higher than two stories. The arrangement works by making the most efficient use of space. Street space in most cities is actually greater than that devoted to buildings. But pedestrian streets can be as small as 2' wide and it is common for streets not to exceed 3' in width. This is enough for people to pass each other. The houses in Fez are also small, as they were built in more minimalist times. On Mars, we can do better than the medieval builders of Fez. We will be building cities in dry enclosures on a planet with only 2/5 of the gravity. So we can safely build 3-4 storey structures out of rammed soil bricks and mortar bound stone, without needing impractically thick walls of the ground floor. With stronger materials, we can build higher. We can even have streets on multiple levels. That would be impractical with cars, but can work in a pedestrian city. The low gravity of Mars allows us to free up space for street restaurants, cafes and small gardens, whilst maintaining very high population density.
Another option occured to me when walking around the Dutch cities. On Earth, areas with high rainfall need a sloped roof, to prevent the weight of water from overburdening roof supports. On Mars, we will be building our cities under frames covered with rock and soil. Essentially, artificial caves. There will be no precipitation unless we deliberately introduce it. Gravity is only 2/5 that of Earth. It should be possible to build all structures with flat roof space. This roof space can be developed as a greenspace, provided that soil is not too thick and heavy. This would provide an open enironment that is above the cramped streets below. In this way, we can effectively stack a garden on top of our city. A place where people can walk and enjoy greenery. The plants will contribute to cleaning and freshening the air. This would be impractically heavy on Earth. But the lower gravity of Mars could allow it.
Last edited by Calliban (2025-11-10 17:25:53)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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