Nüwa City

ABIBOO Studio (www.abiboo.com) has led the architectural design of a self-sufficient and sustainable city on Mars that can house one million humans.

The project is called Nüwa and is part of an exhaustive scientific work for a competition organized by The Mars Society, and fully developed by the SONet network (www.Sonet-hub.com), an international team of scientists and academics, headed by the astrophysicist Guillem Anglada, who led the discovery of exoplanet Proxima-B.

The city of Nüwa is on the slope of one of the Martian cliffs with abundant water access, located at Tempe Mensa. A steep terrain offers the opportunity to create a vertical city inserted into the rock, protected from radiation and meteorites while having access to indirect sunlight.

Nüwa has a population of 250,000 people. Its name has its roots in the mythological Chinese goddess that is the protector of Humans, who melted five stones to give robust societal pillars. Five locations instead of one are chosen to improve resilience, long term easy access to resources, and to add mobility options to the citizens of Mars. For example, Abalos City is located in the North Pole to leverage access to ice and Marineris City is located in the most extensive canyon of the solar system. Although the project divides human settlement into five cities, it offers a highly-scalable and flexible solution that can be implemented in many locations across Mars.

Sustainability, but especially self-sustainable development is at the core of the Nüwa design. For being self-sustainable, a settlement on Mars needs to be able to obtain all resources locally. After a short initial phase relying on capital investments and supplies from Earth, the system should be able to sustain its growth with local resources only.