Paper presented at the XXXIII IAHS World Congress on Housing, 27-30 September 2005,"Transforming Housing Environments through Design", University of Pretoria.
Through a topological analysis of Sudanese house plans and settings, collected from the city of Omdurman, this paper detects a shift in the house type aspired and developed by people during the last four decades. The traditional mud house with its scattered rooms is no longer the prevailing trend; neither are its modified patterns, the institutional house. People today build a compact concrete frame house that encloses all spaces, activities, & people in one built unit. However, despite the new design trends some of the traditional house features, such as the high boundary walls and the segregation between male/female domains, continued to exist in the newly developed types of houses in Omdurman.
