Project Metro Java 2045 is an international project organised around the Dutch-Indonesian collaborative of Dynamic City Foundation, Krill o.r.c.a., Ministry of Infrastructure of Indonesia, and the Yogyakarta Heritage Society. The core team or Think Tank in charge of day-to-day tasks will consist of: professor Bakti Setiawan, UG University and Dr. Wiwandari Handayani, UNDIP-university, and project initiators Dr. Neville Mars and Ir. Harmen van de Wal, with technical support from Dr. John Doyle, RMIT and Dr. Fabien Pfaender, UTC Sorbonne.

Beyond the stakeholder consortium, we have built a network of affiliates working at leading institutes including Gajah Mada University, UNDIP, Universiteit Wageningen, Deltares, the Ministry of Public Works, Ministry of Agrarian affairs and Spatial Planning, Ministry of Villages, and Ministry of Environment and Forestry. ETHs, The Desakota Study Team, ITB and Gajah Mada University in Yogyakarta, the Peri-urban Interface program at UCL, and the EU Strategic Environmental Planning.

Neville Mars is a Dutch architect and planner and principal of MARS Architects, Shanghai, an award winning design studio with twenty years of experience in Asia and buildings realised in Europe and Central America. MARS Architects has a strong focus on sustainable planning and has developed over a dozen integrated planning projects across Asia, including the Sino-Dutch Ecocity in Shenzhen, the Beijing 798 Art District, strategy vision United Mumbai, and the strategic masterplan of Sustainable Pudong 2040. Recent projects include the winning masterplan for a new town in Wuhan and the sustainable master plan of an IT district in Chengdu. 

Dr. Mars is the director of the Dynamic City Foundation (DCF), a non-profit research platform investigating rapid urbanization in Asia. Working across scales and disciplines DCF produces projects such as the research exhibition “Social Mobility” with 2×4 NY, which aim to bridge the gap between urban theory and practice. Recently, DCF has delivered a comprehensive policy study for the Circular Development of Shanghai. Mars is the author of the book The Chinese Dream – a society under construction (010 Publishers, N. Mars, A. Hornsby, R’dam 2008). He has a PhD from RMIT, graduated on topic of urban evolution. He is a lecturer at the China Academy of Art, a BMW Guggenheim Lab fellow, INK fellow, and guest editor of Urban China magazine. Mars has recently been appointed as one of the lead curators of the Xi’An Bi-City Biennale 2021. Coming year Mars will publish his third book Manifesto of Mistakes – urban solutions for the new world, this ecocity manual rethinks the fundamental principles of the urban discipline, to arrive at a site-sensitive and process-driven urbanism.