Imagine building a beautiful, clean city that does not consume more resources than it replaces and then plugging it into an electric grid that is mostly coal powered.

What are the challenges for sustainable urban design in China? How can we design our cities so the natural environment returns to the communities?

Join us this Friday, February 9, at FreshStart as we invite Neville Mars, principal architect of MARS Architecture, to discuss building ecocities for China.

Neville dreams of helping to create a completely sustainable China, and his company, MARS Architecture, develops environmentally friendly, mixed-use buildings and holistic urban development. It has over a decade of large-scale ecocity project experience and is committed to building a sustainable future.

When looking at the cities on maps we often see finely confined dots with a clear, easily defined boundary, but in reality urban development expands like unchecked vines into surrounding areas. The urban sprawl is expansive.

Neville believes we do not need to build more new cities, but instead upgrade our existing urban landscape. He says, in China, it is not sufficient for ecocities to offset their carbon emissions; they must remedy their environment.

If one associated a single element with a city, an image that could manifest itself is metal—a building material, straight, and strong but static. In Mars’s experience however, cities are more like light—ambiguous, unplanned, not entirely organic, and in motion.

For more information, one can visit his website at: http://www.M-A-R-S.asia​ and contact him at: info@burb.tv

FreshStart Rotary Club of Shanghai warmly welcomes all to attend, listen, and ask questions.