Low-cost housing projects in Khartoum with special focus on housing patterns

This paper summarises an M.Sc. (Physical Planning) field project carried out in 1997–98 on the planning of low-cost housing projects in Khartoum. The issue is one which calls for urgent rethinking. Planners seem inexplicably wedded to the rectilinear gridiron pattern in dealing with low-cost housing. The drawbacks of this approach, when the designs are regularly repeated without much revision and the executed projects never brought to completion, have become all too obvious after four decades of practice. The primary objective of this work is to assess this particular aspect while touching on some others which interact with it in the hope of eventually generating feedback to benefit future projects.