Marthinus Grobler

Marthinus Grobler is a South African architect with a particular interest in economics. Throughout his career, he has worked on and investigated many disciplines of the design scale and is mostly concerned with the networks of the city and its manifestations in urban form and culture. Together with various groups, he is developing mechanisms allowing neighbourhoods and cities to evolve as a result of voluntary human actions. This is based on studies into the processes of emergent order found in nature’s distributed systems and the principles of Austrian Economics. He is also campaigning for multiculturalism through political decentralization.

At Tipolis, the developer of new jurisdictions, he is chief architect, which means designing settlements that have to work as places long before they are full. He has practised for nearly two decades and holds a master’s degree from the University of Pretoria.

His subject is emergent urbanism: the observation that the cities people find most liveable were not designed all at once but grew plot by plot under simple rules, and that a new city therefore has to be laid out to permit growth rather than to specify it in advance.

Based in Cape Town, South Africa.