No abstract

Over the past hundred years, Greater Khartoum witnessed five urban planning schemes. Those were the Mclean Plan of 1910, Doxiadis Plan of 1958, MEFIT Plan of 1974, Doxiadis and AM Mustafa Plan of 1991, and MEFIT and CENTECS Plan of 2008. Commissioned by national or sub-national governments in order to direct the growth and development of Greater Khartoum for an average of one to two decades each, those master plans addressed primarily its land use, housing and transportation issues. Little attention was paid to environmental issues and a few proposals were put forward to mitigate the negative environmental impacts of urbanisation and to enhance the positive environmental qualities of Greater Khartoum but those were not fully implemented due to lack of funds and political commitment. The result has been a dismal environmental quality in Khartoum, and grave environmental problems besieging the city today.This paper reviews the urbanisation trends in Greater Khartoum, analyses the previous master plans prepared for it and investigates why they failed to address the emergent environmental issues and to cultivate the rich natural assets the city is endowed with. It points the way to alternative approaches and measures that need to be adopted by public authorities and civil society associations to address this situation.

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Members of impoverished households in Greater Khartoum, who have been displaced from their homelands by famine and civil war, gain a livelihood by utilising a wide variety of subsistence activities and sources. These include moonlighting, income diversification and pooling, exchange relations, scavenging, relief supplies from aid agencies and remittances from relatives working in other areas. This finding challenges the widely held view of the displaced as dependent and parasitic on the wider urban community. Several public policies are identified which have a detrimental effect on the livelihood of the displaced.