What's a City on Mars Like Today?

When you hear the term “Mars city,” what comes to mind? Domes? Underground caves? Lava tubes? Something else?

One of the earliest sci-fi novels I read was A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In that version, Mars had a thin but breathable atmosphere, canals, ancient cities, and several different races. It was a living world, not just a dead planet with dust storms.

But after decades of Mars rover images, lander data, and real science, has that older kind of Mars become impossible to use seriously? Do modern Mars stories need to stick closer to the real planet now?

And if you were designing a Martian city today, where would you put it — on the surface, underground, inside lava tubes, under a dome, or somewhere else entirely?