Reconstruction

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. ...

In 1968, a young man in Khartoum dressed carefully for an evening out with his brother, his sister-in-law, and his sister. They walked to the cinema to see an Indian film about a mother fighting for her children. Everyone in the city, he recalled decades later, was talking about that film. What stayed with him was not the plot but the outing itself: the family together, dressed up, sharing a dark room with a crowd of strangers. Cinema made that possible. ...

Sudan is fighting two crises that are usually discussed separately and are, in fact, one problem. Its electricity system has partially collapsed, and its economy has been unable to convert the end of conflict into durable development for as long as anyone can remember. Reliable power is the precondition for reviving agriculture, restarting industry, and running clinics and schools. The institutions, financing, and investment climate needed to build that power system are themselves casualties of the same decades of conflict that broke the economy. Treating energy reconstruction as a technical side project, separate from the harder political-economy questions, is how Sudan ends up rebuilding the same fragile system twice. ...

Khartoum was not a beautiful city. Decades of under-investment, uncontrolled sprawl, and governance failures had produced a capital with inadequate water, intermittent power, congested roads, inadequate sewerage, and housing that lagged far behind population growth. The urban planning studies conducted before the war documented these problems in detail. Then the war came, and made everything worse by an order of magnitude. What Sudan’s urban war has done to Khartoum — and to Omdurman, Khartoum North, and the metropolitan area that is home to some eight to ten million people — is still being quantified. But the scale is clear enough: residential neighbourhoods destroyed, public buildings gutted, utilities infrastructure shattered, the central business district a battlefield, hospitals looted and bombed, entire quarters of Omdurman reduced to rubble. The displacement has been the largest internal movement of people in Sudanese history. ...

Sudan receives between 6 and 8 kilowatt-hours of solar energy per square metre per day – among the highest figures anywhere on the planet. The Nubian Desert, the Butana Plain, the Bayuda steppe: vast, flat, cloudless, and bathed in sunlight for 300 or more days a year. This is not a marginal resource. It is one of the largest untapped solar endowments in the world, sitting in a country that has, for most of its modern history, been unable to keep the lights on. ...