Four decades of accelerated urbanisation has optimised China's unique urban planning system. Its compact cities offer hope for the next global wave of urbanisation, while China is operating at the cutting edge of urban technology. These are the hallmarks of an urban thought leader. Or have China's hermetic city templates already been surpassed by the prospect of an endless suburbia of its own making?

About the Speaker:

Dr Neville Mars is a Dutch architect and urban planner and the Principal of MARS Architects​ in Shanghai, a sustainable planning and architecture studio with over thirteen years of experience in Asia. Their studio has 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.

Neville is the director of the Dynamic City Foundation (DCF​), a not-for-profit research platform investigating rapid urbanization in Asia. He is the author of The Chinese Dream ​– a society under construction (010 Publishers, 2008): a prophetic analysis of the correlation between city building and society building in China. He will soon publish another book called "Manifesto of Mistakes: Urban Solutions for the New World", an eco-city design manual that rethinks the fundamental principles of the urban discipline to arrive at a comprehensive strategy for site-sensitive and process-driven urbanism.

Neville holds a PhD from RMIT on urban evolution and is a Lecturer at the China Academy of Art, a BMW Guggenheim Lab Fellow, and an INK Fellow.

Convenor: Parul Rewal, Architect and Urbanist

(This talk is co-hosted with China Crossroads.)