Janoob Al Hizam’s Peri-Urban Landscapes in Transformation: Critically mapping displacement-to-settlement processes through resistance towards more inclusive urban design frameworks

The Sudanese capital of Khartoum, similar to many postcolonial African cities, has witnessed exponential urban growth due to rural-urban migration since its independence in 1956. This migration has been highly accelerated by internal displacement between 1970 and 2005. Lacking the tools to address successions of mass displacement, the state resorted to inherited colonial planning practices that have allocated displaced communities to the underserved southern peripheries of the city, pushing the majority of them into urban poverty. Over the past five decades, the peri-urban landscape of Khartoum has consequently been drastically (re)shaped by state-led planning strategies and humanitarian responses (Bannaga, 1996; Hamid, 1992; El-Bushra, Hijazi, 1995) that concentrate in and around old villages, agricultural lands, and informal settlements (Steel, Abukashaw, Hussein, 2019). In response to, and despite this, inhabitants of these settlements and newly arriving communities in search of affordable housing, have nonetheless continued todevelop new strategies to access land, urban services, and livelihoods that resist oppressive state-led urban policies. These strategies have often been framed in discourses of informality and accused by the state of being detrimental to aspired processes of “urban development”. Despite the state’s continuous efforts to develop land policies that enable these communities to own land through titling and land registration, its approach has been heavily driven by market logics, disregarding the heterogenous and multi-functional peri-urban landscapes and settlements created by displaced communities (Steel, Abukashaw, Hussein, 2019). Through the use of critical mapping, the research aims to work with communities living in the peri-urban landscape of Janoob Al Hizam (South of the Belt), south of Khartoum. This methodology will be used to investigate the strategies of resistance developed by communities to access land, urban services, and livelihoods, and how these strategies are manifested in spatial form. Despite the rush by the state and private real-estate investors to push land commoditisation and privatisation, if taken seriously, the underlying hypothesis holds that a better understanding of these practices can inform alternative avenues towardsmore inclusive urban design frameworks.