Neville Mars is the principal of MARS Architects in Shanghai, a sustainable planning and architecture studio with over thirteen years of experience in Asia. MARS Architects have won national and international architecture competitions, including the winning entry for the national image museum in Chengdu, and the winning entry for a brand headquarters in Sofia, currently under construction. MARS has developed over a dozen integrated planning projects across Asia, including the Sino-Dutch Ecocity in Shenzhen, currently under construction, the Beijing 798 Art District, Vision United Mumbai, and the integral master plan for Caofeidian Ecocity. Recently MARS has been invited by UN HABITAT to collaborate on the planning of Tacloban in the Philippines, the city ravaged by typhoon Haiyan. Neville Mars is also the director of the Dynamic City Foundation (DCF), a not-for-profit research platform investigating rapid urbanization in Asia. Starting his career at OMA, a distinct research-driven approach has become the trademark of the DCF, spawning collaborations with a range of educational, commercial, artistic and research institutes worldwide. Working across scales and disciplines DCF produces projects that bridge the traditional gap between theory and practice, art installations and technology, research and design.

Mars is a lecturer at the China Academy of Art and has a PhD from RMIT, focused on urban theory. He is a member of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, and fellow presenter at the TEDglobal_INK conference. Mars is the author of the book The Chinese Dream – a society under construction (010 Publishers, N. Mars, A. Hornsby, Rotterdam 2008). The 800 page tome proved to be a prophetic analysis of the correlation between city building and society building in China, inspiring the theme of China’s 12th FYP. Winter 2016, Mars published his second book “Manifesto of Mistakes – urban solutions for the new world”, this ecocity design manual rethinks the fundamental principles of the urban discipline, to arrive at a comprehensive strategy for process-driven integrated urban planning.