The Superblock: Marc Koehler’s Vision for Resilient Cities, as Featured in FD

Marc was recently featured in the Dutch Financial Times (het FD), sharing his vision for sustainable cities and real estate development. Inspired by Sarah Wilson’s book ‘I Eat the Stars’ and podcast ‘Wild’, he argues that today’s real estate and construction models weren’t built for tomorrow’s questions — and that the answer lies in building resilient communities. He translates that into a spatial strategy: the Superblock, a mixed-use urban village designed around what we call Supersystems, making neighbourhoods less dependent on large corporations and external systems, and better equipped to weather climate, social and demographic shocks.

In I Eat the Stars, Sarah Wilson sketches a world sliding into collapse — rapid climate change, artificial intelligence advancing faster than we can govern it, the growing risk of hybrid warfare, Big Tech and a handful of powerful players tightening their grip, and democracies straining under pressure — and asks how we keep living well as it all unfolds. She rejects two easy answers: blind hope that the systems will right themselves, and the isolated self-sufficiency of the bunker-builder. Her alternative is community — when the large systems we relied on become unreliable, it is the people around us that carry us through.

At MKA, we recognise ourselves in that alternative. We found that a community needs to run its own essential systems to be resilient — but neither the individual building nor the neighbourhood is the right scale to do so: a building is too small to carry them on its own, a neighbourhood too large and fragmented for people to actually organise around them. Between the two sits a scale we’ve come to specialise in: the Superblock — a resilient, mixed-use urban village organised around circular, closed-loop systems for energy, water retention, building materials, waste, ecology, biodiversity, mobility and food, combined with shared social, cultural and economical infrastructure. We call these supersystems: a need that arises within a community is met within that same community, before it is sourced from outside it. At the heart of every block sits a natural core — a tiny forest, pocket parks, vegetable gardens, water — that cools and ventilates homes passively, strengthens biodiversity, and filters air and noise across the block. The result is a daily, sensory kind of wellbeing: birdsong, the scent of planting, the sound of leaves, brought back into dense urban living.

Click here for the publication