For our submission to the Mars Society’s 2019 Mars Colony Prize designing the first human settlement on Mars, Emerging Futures teamed up with Akhil Rao, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado, Boulder, to develop a bold vision for the future of permanent human settlement on the Red Planet. We combined engineering analysis, urban design, detailed mass and energy flow modeling, aesthetics, economic theory and social considerations to produce a 20-page report detailing the demographics, physical layout, major industrial activities, key economic drivers and political principles underlying a dynamic, growing settlement of 1,000 people. Selection will take place over the next few months, and the top three winners are eligible for cash prizes. Emerging Futures spent considerable internal resources developing its plan because we believe that envisioning future human space colonies in detail is a worthwhile endeavor that can inform research priorities and near-term activities. We have since been selected to present our findings at the 10th joint meeting of The Space Resources Roundtable and the Planetary & Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium, to be held in June 2019 at the Colorado School of Mines.