This is a living reference, updated periodically as conditions and priorities change. As of mid-2026, Sudan’s war is in its fourth year; the army has recaptured Khartoum and national institutions officially returned to the capital in January 2026, bringing a fragile, partial normalcy to central Khartoum even as fighting continues elsewhere, notably Darfur. That makes this a reconstruction-planning document, not a hypothetical one.
Why This Matters Now
Sudan’s cities were shaped by a century of planning that consistently deprioritized ordinary residents. The 1930s colonial-era plan for Khartoum built a European-style core with boulevards, a botanical garden, and storm drainage — but explicitly excluded Omdurman and Khartoum North, pushing “native villages” beyond the railway line with no equivalent investment. Every plan since — the 1991 Doxiadis structure plan, the 2008–2033 KPP5 plan — repeated the pattern: infrastructure for the center, informal growth and neglect at the margins, and green space treated as the first casualty when budgets tightened.
The result today is a set of well-documented, recurring problems. Flooding is structural, not incidental. Khartoum sits at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles and is additionally exposed to flash floods from seasonal wadis and khors. The 1988 flood — one of the worst in a century — devastated IDP camps and squatter settlements and forced a decade of “rehabilitation” planning that was never fully funded. Tuti Island alone has been hit by major floods in 1946, 1988, and 1998. As recently as August 2024, floods killed at least 68 people nationwide, destroyed or damaged over 12,000 houses, displaced roughly 180,000 people across 15 states, and damaged the Arba’at dam in Red Sea State badly enough to cut clean water access for 500,000 people and trigger a cholera outbreak with over 21,000 cases and 640 deaths. This is not history — it is an active, recurring risk.
Green space is always the first thing cut. The green belts proposed west of Omdurman and east of Khartoum North in the 1977 MEFIT plan were largely stripped for firewood and building material by displaced settlers within a decade, and were never replanted. Public riverfront parks — al-Mogran, Six of April — have since been privatized or fenced off and monetized rather than kept as public commons.
Waste collection reaches the center, not the periphery. UN-Habitat’s own sector study of Khartoum found the formal garbage system efficient at collection but weak at disposal — and in low-income, informally settled areas, garbage is often dumped directly into drainage channels, which is a direct cause of the flooding above. The two problems are the same problem. Sanitation infrastructure struggles where it’s needed most: weak soil in many informal areas makes pit latrines difficult to install properly, and the same areas have poorly designed channel slopes that cause serious flooding. Public space, meanwhile, has never been designed with women in mind — none of the historical plans reviewed here mention gender-specific provision in parks, toilets, or lighting, a gap this piece treats as a first-class design requirement, not an afterthought.
Inequality is measured, not just felt. A 1986 University of Khartoum PhD thesis found that, by the 1983 census, 24.4% of Khartoum’s population lived in squatter areas and a further 29.6% in “replanning areas” — meaning over half the city’s population lived outside the formally serviced city. First- and second-class residential areas held just 5.6% of the population but 15% of all urban land, and the service gap was written into law: 1923–1947 building regulations entitled third-class areas to only open drainage and one paved road, while first-class areas alone got covered drainage, sewerage, paved footpaths, and street trees. This wasn’t planning failure so much as planning working exactly as designed — a pattern any new strategy has to actively counteract, not just avoid repeating.
What Sudan’s Own Government Has Actually Done
It’s worth being precise here, because “the government never does anything” and “the government has a plan for everything” are both wrong, and the truth changes what should be recommended. Sudan has a real, decades-long institutional track record on urban issues — some of it genuinely implemented at scale, some of it perpetually stuck at the policy-diagnosis stage.
A 2012–2013 UN-Habitat report on jointly funded Sudan government/UN-Habitat projects documents specific, delivered results. In Khartoum (2007–2011, $3.58 million, EU/Italian Cooperation funded), the work fed directly into the Khartoum Structure Plan and produced two formal Khartoum State government resolutions — the Khartoum Slum Upgrading Programme and the Khartoum Urban Observatory, a seven-site network for monitoring urban growth. Three pilot slum-upgrading projects were actually completed: Mansoura (11,000 landless poor replanned and regularized, 1,973 serviced plots), Mayo (2,000 refugee families received plots and infrastructure), and Al Rasheed (7,000 squatter families received land, four model houses, seven water tanks, four schools, one health center). In Darfur (2011–2013, $2.13 million, USAID/OFDA funded), the programme trained government staff and demarcated land for IDPs exiting camps. Sudan-wide, this programme trained nearly 3,000 people in low-cost stabilised-soil-block construction — a genuinely low-cost, locally buildable technology adopted at meaningful scale.
Separately, Sudan’s National Council for Physical Development reports a longer, government-run squatter-settlement programme going back to 1980, run through a sequence of institutions using three approaches: upgrading (replan in place, add services), amalgamation (formally absorb adjacent villages into the city), and demolition/relocation, reserved for genuinely hazardous sites. By the government’s own count: roughly 94,700 plots issued via site-and-services between 1990 and 2005, 160,900 plots via village amalgamation between 1985 and 2004, and 180,000 houses via the state Housing Fund between 2001 and 2012 — a claimed total of over 435,000 land and housing units delivered. The government’s own conclusion is that this reduced Khartoum’s squatter population to “less than 20%,” a figure worth treating with some skepticism given how it sits against the 1983 census data above, but the institutional and numerical track record behind it is real, not vaporware.
What stayed at the plan stage is instructive too. Sudan’s National Urban Policy — the overarching document meant to tie all of this together — was, as of the last available assessment in 2016, still formally at the “diagnosis” stage under the National Council for Physical Development, never having progressed to adoption. The pattern across nearly a century isn’t “no plans.” It’s plans that get written, partially funded through donor-backed pilot projects at neighborhood scale, and never carried to citywide implementation before the next crisis — drought, war, flood — resets the clock. Mansoura, Mayo, and Al Rasheed, along with the stabilised-soil-block training programme, are proof that donor-funded, government-partnered, neighborhood-scale pilots can and do get built in Khartoum. The failure mode historically hasn’t been that nothing gets built — it’s been failure to scale a working pilot into a citywide programme before funding or political attention moved on.
Greening the Landscape
Every Khartoum structure plan since the 1970s has proposed green belts and urban parks; every one has seen that green space eroded, defunded, or privatized within a decade. The cheapest fixes are the ones already sitting there to be reclaimed: what’s left of the 1977 green belt corridors could be formally gazetted against further encroachment even before replanting begins, community tree-planting on public rights-of-way with drought-tolerant native species costs almost nothing since the land is already public, and vacant plots can become pocket parks or community gardens on a temporary-use basis, sidestepping the years-long land tenure disputes that block permanent development. Urban agriculture, much of it done by women, already functions as informal green infrastructure and a flood buffer on the floodplain and deserves protection rather than displacement, which has been the historical pattern on Tuti Island.
The longer-term case is for a funded, monitored green-belt replanting program with real legal protection against the kind of encroachment that destroyed the last one, a citywide tree canopy target tied to a measurable metric rather than a plan document, and minimum green space ratios mandated in new subdivisions and downtown renewal.
Singapore’s “City in a Garden” is the clearest large-scale precedent. Starting in the 1960s under Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore treated greening as core infrastructure, not decoration; by 2020, 46.5% of the island was green space with nearly 30% tree canopy. Three mechanisms are transferable: extensive roadside tree planting for shade, which measurably cuts surface temperatures four to six degrees Celsius in the hottest neighborhoods; a landscape replacement policy requiring ground-level greenery lost to development to be replaced one-to-one vertically, relevant to dense central Khartoum where ground space is scarce; and a 360-plus-kilometer Park Connector Network, showing that greening doesn’t require one large park so much as many small connected pieces stitched together. Addis Ababa’s “Beautifying Sheger” project is the more directly comparable case — a similarly resourced regional capital tackling greening and flooding as one project. Since 2019, Addis Ababa has dredged its flood-prone river corridors, built stormwater retention ponds on tributaries, and converted reclaimed riverside land into parks and shared vegetable gardens that double as flood buffers, while planting over 90 million tree seedlings in the capital in seven years.
Flood Mitigation
Khartoum’s flood risk is threefold: main-river flooding from the Blue Nile, White Nile, and the Nile itself; flash flooding from wadis and khors; and, critically, man-made flooding from blocked drainage, since garbage is routinely disposed of directly into drainage channels in under-serviced areas. Clearing drainage channels on a schedule tied to garbage collection is probably the single highest-leverage cheap intervention available, since blocked channels are a leading cause of flood damage; mapping and gazetting flood-prone informal areas would stop future investment from being repeatedly lost to the same floodplains; and even simple depressions or basins in parks and public squares can double as flood storage in the rainy season and usable public space the rest of the year.
The longer-term programme needs multi-phase drainage investment prioritized by flood-vulnerability mapping rather than concentrated in the wealthy center as it historically has been, nature-based flood defense along the riverfront that reclaims privatized or informally occupied riverbank land and converts it into parks and urban agriculture that absorb floodwater by design, building codes for informal-settlement upgrading that address channel slope and soil drainage directly, and a dam and critical-infrastructure resilience review prompted directly by the 2024 Arba’at dam damage that cut water access for half a million people.
Rotterdam pioneered the “water square” as a direct answer to this kind of problem — most famously Benthemplein, completed in 2013, whose three lowered basins function as a sports court, amphitheater, and seating area most of the year and store up to 1.7 million liters of stormwater during heavy rain. That dual-use principle, flood infrastructure that is public space 95% of the time, is directly transferable to an underfunded public-space budget. Mexico City’s Parque Lineal La Viga makes the same case at a scale and cost closer to what Khartoum could realistically fund: built on the site of a former canal, it renovates roughly 10,000 square meters of existing green space and adds 6,700 square meters more while collecting rainwater from paved surfaces for storage, its tree cover and reflecting pools cooling the surrounding area at the same time.
Housing and Informal Settlements
This connects the government’s own track record above to the international literature on what actually works for informal-settlement upgrading, since it underpins the flooding, sanitation, and greening problems throughout this piece. The government’s own framework already distinguishes upgrading from demolition, and prioritizing the former makes sense on its own terms: in-place upgrading keeps existing social networks and livelihoods intact and is cheaper per household than relocation. Scaling the stabilised-soil-block construction programme the government and UN-Habitat pilots already proved out is the most immediately available lever, since the skill base and training pipeline already exist.
The longer-term need is to fund the scale-up phase explicitly rather than just the next pilot, since pilots have repeatedly worked and repeatedly failed to scale before the next crisis, and to resolve formal land tenure, since insecure tenure is what pushes residents toward the informal-market cycle documented in the 1986 census data above. Indonesia’s Kampung Improvement Programme is the closest large-scale precedent for what Sudan’s own upgrading approach is already trying to do. Running from 1969 to 1998 across 800 Indonesian cities and reaching an estimated 30 million people, it is one of the most-cited slum-upgrading programmes in the world — it won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1980 — because of its low cost and community-driven design: it added basic infrastructure to existing informal neighborhoods in place, mobilizing residents’ own labor and resources rather than relocating them. In Surabaya alone it reached over 1.2 million residents, proof the approach can work at a scale Sudan hasn’t yet reached.
Garbage Collection
The formal system collects waste efficiently but disposal is weak, and in poorer, informal areas garbage ends up in drainage channels, directly causing the flooding problem above. This is a distribution and last-mile problem as much as a capacity problem: dense informal settlements with narrow, unpaved streets are physically inaccessible to standard collection trucks. Neighborhood collection points for these areas, staffed by neighborhood associations and feeding into main routes, solve the access problem without new trucks; participation works better incentivized than mandated; and monthly community clean-up days directly target the channel litter causing both flooding and disease risk.
Longer term, the real bottleneck is disposal capacity rather than collection, since collection already outpaces disposal; the existing informal waste-picker economy is worth formalizing rather than displacing; and a plastic bag ban is a low-enforcement-cost lever worth considering. Curitiba’s Green Exchange and Garbage Purchase programmes are the clearest model: since 1991, residents of informal communities unreachable by collection trucks bring waste to fixed points, earning fresh produce or a bus ticket per kilogram delivered, with about 7,500 residents participating and roughly 2,800 tons of waste turned in a year, solving waste removal, food insecurity, and transport access with a single mechanism. Kigali’s Umuganda is the cheapest intervention in this entire piece to pilot, since it costs coordination time rather than capital: Rwanda’s mandatory last-Saturday-of-the-month community clean-up combines street sweeping, weeding, tree planting, and public-building repair, and paired with six-day-a-week contracted street sweeping and a 2008 plastic bag ban, Kigali is consistently ranked the cleanest city in Africa. Cairo’s Zabaleen community, concentrated in the informal settlement of Manshiet Nasser, makes the formalize-rather-than-displace case most starkly: it has run one of the highest-performing waste-recycling systems in the world for decades, processing roughly 3,000 tons of Cairo’s garbage a day and recycling around 85% of it, far above most formal municipal systems anywhere, having grown entirely informally alongside participatory settlement-upgrading programmes that treat physical upgrading and livelihood support as inseparable.
Public Toilets, Designed for Both Men and Women
None of the historical Khartoum planning documents reviewed here mention gender-specific sanitation provision. This is a planning blind spot more than a technical one. UN and WaterAid guidance is explicit that a 1:1 male-female stall ratio under-serves women in practice, given longer average use time, menstrual needs, and often supervising children — the practical fix is more stalls for women, not equal counts. Siting toilets for visibility and lighting rather than just proximity costs little beyond the siting decision itself. Low-cost pour-flush pit-latrine kits can be deployed fast in markets, transit points, and informal settlements without waiting for full sewer connection, and the skill base for this already exists in-country: the government/UN-Habitat programme above already trained over 60 people on VIP-latrine construction.
The longer-term need is a public sanitation standard built on UN framework criteria — availability, accessibility, affordability, quality and safety, acceptability and dignity — applied to every new and existing public facility, and structural coordination with drainage work, since weak soil for latrines and poor channel slopes for drainage compound each other in the same neighborhoods. Sulabh’s low-cost toilet model out of India is the clearest transplant candidate: its two-pit pour-flush design uses about 1.5 liters of water per flush, can be built by local labor from locally sourced materials, and starts around $15 per unit, with pay-per-use pricing making it self-sustaining rather than a permanent subsidy line. Only 27% of Sudan’s population has access to improved sanitation per UN-Habitat’s most recent country factsheet, well within Sulabh’s own stated replication target of countries under 50% coverage, and the model has already been adapted successfully in Africa and Latin America.
Gardens and Parks, Safe for Both Men and Women, with Security Cameras
Khartoum’s public parks have a specific, documented failure mode: rather than being neglected, they’ve been actively privatized. Al-Mogran park was privatized and closed in 2006; Six of April park was fenced and converted into a paid facility. Reclaiming and reopening at least one flagship park as genuinely free public space, with basic lighting and a visible security presence, would be a real proof of concept before larger investment. Low-cost CCTV at park entrances and central sightlines is cheap relative to a full security-guard payroll, and natural surveillance principles — open sightlines, activity near paths rather than pushed to the edges, lit paths — cost nothing extra if built into a redesign from the start.
Longer term, this needs a CPTED-based design standard applied to all new and renovated parks, a dedicated women’s safety programme embedding gender-safety review into public space planning from the start, and legal protection against future re-privatization of designated public green space. Bogotá has made public-space safety for women an explicit mayoral priority, embedding gender-equity review directly into public space design and management alongside supporting measures like women-only transport options, while Medellín has expanded its security camera network for both crime deterrence and general public-space monitoring. Together with the CPTED framework — territoriality, natural and mechanical surveillance, and access control — these give a concrete, low-cost design checklist any park renovation can use without waiting for a citywide security budget.
Mobilizing Civic Commitment: Sudan’s National Service as an Opportunity
Sudan has had a National Service Act since 1992. It requires every Sudanese citizen aged 18 to 33 to complete a term of national service, but the law does not limit that to the military — it explicitly allows service in government departments and public projects for social and economic development. Duration is graduated by education: twelve months for university graduates, eighteen for high school graduates, and twenty-four months for everyone else, the tier that covers the largest share of Sudanese youth, since most don’t complete university. Before 2019, completion of national service was also a prerequisite for a university degree to be authenticated and for government employment.
The Act remains formally in force but is not being actively or systematically enforced during the war years, understandably, since forced conscription would further damage the army’s standing with the population. That non-enforcement is itself an opening: the civic-development track of the law is currently unused capacity, not a programme that has to be built from nothing or that competes with active military conscription for the same recruits. The timing matters, too. National institutions officially returned to Khartoum in January 2026, and the city is in an early, fragile reconstruction phase, structurally similar to the period after the 2007 displacement crisis that produced the Mansoura, Mayo, and Al Rasheed pilots above. That is exactly the gap the National Service Act’s civic-development clause was written to fill, the same gap Rwanda’s Umuganda and Singapore’s own National Service fill in their own countries, doubling as nation-building and social-cohesion tools rather than purely military ones.
Concretely, the civic-service track could route directly into the quick wins above: drainage-channel clearance, tree planting, park clean-up, and stabilised-soil-block construction training are all labor-intensive, low-skill-entry, immediately visible work. It would work better organized by municipality rather than centrally mandated, following Rwanda’s monthly, locally coordinated model, which is cheaper to stand up and easier to keep legitimate in a period of low trust in central institutions. It should be paid or credentialed as genuine employment and education progress rather than treated as a coercive obligation — the pre-2019 model of gating university and government-job authentication on service completion was unpopular, and a rebuilt version tied to real stipends, skills training, and visible civic recognition would build the kind of participation and legitimacy Umuganda gets from being a source of pride rather than punishment. It should be targeted geographically at the flood-vulnerability and squatter-settlement maps already called for above, so it doesn’t repeat the center-first pattern that is the root problem throughout this piece. And it should be treated as a channel for young women’s participation specifically, not just young men’s — given how absent gender-safety and gender-equity design has historically been from Sudanese planning, involving young women directly in building this infrastructure is itself a way to close that gap structurally rather than by retrofit.
Applying This to Minor Cities and Towns
Everything above is written primarily against Khartoum’s documented history, but the same themes apply, often more cheaply and more easily, to Sudan’s secondary cities and towns. Port Sudan, Kassala, El Obeid, Nyala, and Wad Madani haven’t yet built the sprawl and drainage mistakes documented in Khartoum’s history, so green-belt protection, CPTED-informed park design, and non-motorized transport planning are far cheaper to get right the first time than to retrofit. Secondary cities also absorb migration pressure that would otherwise land on Khartoum, and Sudan’s own government data shows this isn’t hypothetical: Port Sudan, Wad Medani, Nyala, and Kassala all independently report squatter-population shares between 40% and 60%, comparable to or exceeding Khartoum’s, meaning these towns need the same toolkit, not a scaled-down afterthought. Thinner budgets make the cheapest interventions here — Umuganda-style clean-up days, Curitiba-style informal collection points, Sulabh-style pay-per-use toilets, CPTED design choices that cost nothing extra, a locally organized National Service civic track — proportionally more valuable, since they don’t require the large capital budgets these towns don’t have.
A Historical Footnote: Sudan Has Exported Municipal Expertise Before
Worth remembering while looking abroad for models: Sudan has already been the source of a “best practice” export before, not just an importer of one. When Dubai built its first modern municipality in the late 1950s, the British political agents who set it up were drawn largely from the Sudanese Political Service, which had just wound down at Sudan’s 1956 independence. They recruited former Sudanese municipal employees to help run Dubai’s new city administration — one recruit described being trained “to run cities on the same concepts as British local-government laws,” concepts he’d already learned running Sudanese towns. Dubai’s own political agent traveled to Sudan specifically to recruit this expertise once his city’s building boom outran its municipal capacity to regulate it. Modern Dubai’s municipal governance was partly built by people trained in Khartoum — Sudan’s own administrative and planning talent, not just its literal urban form, is a resource worth remembering when this piece turns to what Sudan should import.
Further Reading — Kandaka Library
Urban Sector Studies and Capacity Building, UN-Habitat’s own sector-by-sector diagnosis of Khartoum’s spatial planning, land, housing, and basic-services failures — the primary source behind several of the findings above.
Khartoum Urban Area: A Study on Urban Planning, a 1986 University of Khartoum PhD thesis by Hassan Elyas Mohammed — mislabeled elsewhere as Gamal M. Hamid — source of the 1983 census/class-disparity data cited above.
Tackling Squatter Settlements in Sudanese Cities (SSISC), Sumaia Omer Mohamed Gamie, National Council for Physical Development — the Sudanese government’s own presentation on squatter-settlement history and results, source of the site-and-services and village-amalgamation figures cited above.
Supporting Urban Development in Sudan: Beyond Emergency Relief, UN-Habitat — source of the Mansoura, Mayo, and Al Rasheed pilot-project figures cited above.
A Glimpse of Dubai in Khartoum and Nouakchott: Prestige Urban Projects on the Margins of the Arab World, Armelle Choplin and Olivier Pliez — on the modern, reversed-direction version of the Dubai/Khartoum relationship discussed above.
City Making in Africa: Urban Planning and Development, Azza Mustafa Babikir Ahmed — source of the Tuti Island 1988 flood account.
Beyond the Riverside: An Alternative Sustainable Vision for Khartoum Riverfront Development, Ibrahim Zakaria Bahreldin.
Characterization of Urban Agricultural Activities in Khartoum State, Sahar Babiker Ahmed Abdalla — on the urban farming discussed in the greening section above.