A city of sea, sun and salt-laden winds. For generations, Port Sudan pulsed with a distinct sense of calm. At every turn, one could catch the aroma of coffee mingling with the scent of the Red Sea and feel the steady cadence of life flowing through its streets and promenades.
Markets grew crowded at times, yet in ways that remained familiar and predictable. Children darted between neighborhoods, vendors called out in voices long woven into the city’s soundscape, and vehicles moved at an even pace.
Everything here, from the smallest daily detail to the broader urban order, suggest a city deeply aware of itself, and residents attuned to its rhythm.
That rhythm may have appeared to be little more than a social habit, but it was rooted in the very character of a city founded on the principle of organization.
Port Sudan was built between 1905 and 1909 to replace Suakin, the historic port whose narrow, complex waterway and surrounding coral reefs had become obstacles to the passage of modern ships. From that moment onward, Port Sudan emerged as Sudan’s principal seaport and its most vital gateway for international trade.
In his account of the city’s origins, historian Kenneth J. Perkins explains that the selection of Port Sudan’s location was far from arbitrary. British planners viewed the area known as Sheikh Barghout, where the city would later rise, as a more suitable site for the country’s principal seaport and a better location for building a new urban centre.
Compared with the crowded town of Suakin, constrained by narrow streets and limited room for expansion, the area was regarded as largely free of both physical obstacles and dense settlement.
Perkins notes that the land surrounding the new site was described at the time as ideal for a city, offering ample space for growth before construction of the port and the city began in January 1905.
Port Sudan was planned according to a rigid colonial vision that treated space as a tool for regulating people, labor and movement.
That vision was reflected in the very layout of the city’s streets.
Perkins writes that central Port Sudan was designed in a grid of regular blocks, each measuring roughly 100 metres in length and intersected by six-metre-wide alleys.
These passageways were not merely back lanes; they were intended to facilitate access to residential plots, waste collection, and the future installation of water and sewage networks with minimal disruption. Even the orientation of building facades was carefully calculated to capture the cooling northeastern winds in the city’s hot and humid climate.
It was therefore no surprise that daily movement in Port Sudan felt intuitive and manageable to its residents. Successive state administrations took care to preserve this orderly character: clean streets, clearly defined sidewalks and essential services located within reasonable reach of everyday life.
Even the mobility of pedestrians, older residents and people with disabilities formed part of this urban vision, walkable distances, familiar marketplaces and neighborhoods whose residents knew precisely when they would grow crowded and when they would fall quiet.
Despite subsequent transformations, this urban planning framework continued to give Port Sudan a relatively stable daily rhythm, one that residents could anticipate and adapt to with ease. Yet that same rhythm has begun to shift rapidly under the pressures of war and displacement.
Like many colonial cities constructed across imperial territories in the early 20th century, Port Sudan’s urban rhythm was inseparable from the way the city itself was designed. From its inception, it was planned according to a rigid colonial vision that treated space as a tool for regulating people, labor and movement alike. The city was laid out in a semicircular form stretching inland from the port and divided into distinct residential zones based on clear racial and occupational hierarchies. The area nearest the sea was reserved for British authorities and government institutions, enjoying extensive services, paved roads and grand buildings. Foreign merchants, including Indians, Greeks, Turks and Egyptians, occupied other neighborhoods that benefited from relatively abundant services. Sudanese civil servants and local traders were assigned smaller districts with fewer amenities, while laborers tied to the port and railway system, most of them Beja, Yemenis and West Africans, were pushed to the city’s margins in impoverished quarters lacking reliable water, electricity and secure property rights.
Although this segregation was later dismantled in official terms, its imprint remained evident in Port Sudan’s social and urban landscape. Neighbourhoods continued to evolve along lines of income, tribal affiliation and occupations linked to port activity and manual labor.
Over time, these clusters, originally encouraged by British authorities as a means of organizing and controlling the workforce, became mechanisms for preserving tribal identities within the city, particularly among communities with pastoral roots.
As a result, Port Sudan never developed a clear divide between rural and urban life, as occurred in other Sudanese cities.
Instead, it continued to embody a living extension of tribal networks and seasonal migration routes connecting the Red Sea countryside to the center of port activity, employment and public services.
This urban and social legacy helps explain the city’s current sensitivity to rapid population pressures. Port Sudan was never built to function as an open-ended city without internal limits. Rather, it was conceived as an organized port city, structured around specific functions and carefully allocated spaces. As war and displacement reshaped the country, however, those old boundaries began to blur in unprecedented ways.
Today, the city finds itself crowded and strained, testing its ability to absorb new roles that extend far beyond what it was originally designed to accommodate.
Noha, a mother of three who works on the medical staff of a hospital in Port Sudan, longs for those earlier days.
Getting to work, Noha recalls, took no more than 15 minutes. Public transportation around the market was efficient and predictable, allowing her to find a ride within minutes.
Movement through the city was comfortable and easy to anticipate, but this has changed now
Noha, a hospital worker in Port Sudan recalling life before the war and displacement
Movement through the city, as she describes it, was “comfortable and easy to anticipate,” making her daily routine seamless, from home to work, from the market to school, and from a quiet evening into the next morning.
Then came the war and the waves of displacement.
Suddenly, thousands arrived from other cities, bringing with them different needs, destinations and patterns of movement. The city’s population density surged, and the predictability of daily life began to disappear.
Neighbourhoods that had once been quiet grew congested. Residential apartments were converted into offices and workplaces. Small open spaces became permanent waiting points.
Even the rhythm of the day changed. Morning no longer marked a clear beginning to activity; movement now starts before dawn, transportation queues stretch for hours, and evening is no longer a time for rest but an extension of a day that never seems to end.
The United Nations (UN)’s displacement data for the Red Sea State from April 2024 indicate that the region had received more than 247,000 internally displaced people, 93 per cent of whom were residing in Port Sudan.
The latest Displacement Tracking Matrix report also found that 81 per cent of displaced people in the state remained within the locality. This population surge has brought far more than a statistical increase in arrivals.
It has introduced new patterns of movement and new demands for housing, employment, transportation, water, electricity and public services.
Port Sudan’s particular challenge lies in the fact that it is unlike the inland Nile cities, which are open on all sides and supported by abundant water resources. It is a coastal city anchored to the Red Sea and historically connected to the port, the marketplace and the roads leading inland.
Its climate is harsh, remaining hot and humid for much of the year. Fresh water depends largely on Wadi Arba’at in the Red Sea Hills and on desalination plants, inherently limited sources that have long made access to basic services a defining feature of the city’s geography.
It is this geography that makes congestion in Port Sudan more than a matter of slower traffic. A city once known for its predictable rhythm has suddenly come under intense pressure at its commercial and institutional core: the market, the port, government offices, universities, hospitals and transportation hubs. What changed was not only the streets themselves, but the function of the street. It has become a space for transit, waiting, work and the search for opportunity all at once.
Noha says the roads leading to the market have become heavily congested during peak hours, as have the streets surrounding the city’s major universities, while roads inside residential neighborhoods remain relatively calm.
Yet despite the slower commute to and from work, the pace of daily life itself feels faster than ever.
Economic pressures and the need to juggle multiple jobs have pushed many people into longer working hours, often splitting their days between morning and evening shifts. Some shops and cafés now stay open late into the night in a city that once settled into quiet as the sun went down.
The effects of this transformation extend beyond traffic and transportation. Sidewalks that once made walking easy have, in some areas, become crowded with merchandise, waiting passengers and streams of pedestrians.
People with disabilities, whose mobility was once more manageable along parts of the city’s streets, now face greater challenges navigating public spaces as sidewalks narrow and pedestrian movement increasingly overlaps with vehicles and street commerce.
From this constant motion emerge new questions: Who can still move freely? Who now requires assistance? And for whom has the journey become longer than it once was?
Economically and socially, displacement has also reshaped standards of living and family life.
Noha recalls that she once had the means to take her children on outings or dine at restaurants.
Today, however, her income barely covers basic living expenses. She observes that differences in habits between newcomers and longtime residents have created new patterns in the use of streets and public facilities, particularly regarding cleanliness, crowding and behavior in shared spaces.
Yet she does not place responsibility on any single group. The war, she says, has imposed immense pressures on everyone, forcing the city itself to test an unfamiliar capacity for endurance.
For much of Sudan’s recent collective memory, particularly during the 2010s, Port Sudan was known more as a city of beaches and holiday escapes than as a place of prolonged, involuntary residence.
The real tension is not between residents and newcomers, but between a city of limited resources and a rapidly accelerating population reality imposed abruptly by war.
The Red Sea state gained renown for its coastline and coral reefs, while Port Sudan and Suakin stood among the country’s most popular seaside destinations, especially during the milder months of the year.
Yet the city that visitors once associated with seasonal trips, sea breezes and salt-laden air has suddenly become a long-term refuge for families displaced from Khartoum, Darfur and other regions, not in search of leisure, but of safety, employment and essential services.
Refaa Hussein, who was displaced from Khartoum, spoke about her experience after arriving in Port Sudan about six months ago and settling into shared accommodation provided by her employer. She describes her first experience navigating the city as straightforward and accessible, even for newcomers. According to Refaa, the market’s central location helped her understand the city’s layout and move around without needing to memorize streets or landmarks in detail.
She also notes how Port Sudan differs from some of the cities she passed through during her displacement journey. After leaving Khartoum, she traveled through several towns in the Northern state, where transportation, in her experience, relied more heavily on limited and individual means such as tuk-tuks, donkey carts and small private vehicles, making movement slower and more complicated. By contrast, she found that Port Sudan offered clearer routes and a street network that was easier to navigate, allowing her to adapt quickly to the city despite the pressures of congestion and overcrowding.
Yet a city that is easy to navigate is not necessarily easy to endure. Although Port Sudan has remained calmer than many Sudanese cities since the outbreak of the war, it has increasingly found itself under mounting pressure on its infrastructure and essential services. As the population and the number of arrivals have grown, electricity, water and fuel have ceased to be merely service-related concerns; they have become integral to the broader question of movement itself. When electricity falters, hospitals, offices and homes are affected. When fuel supplies are disrupted, transportation slows and costs rise. When services are delayed, the journey to work, school or the market becomes longer, even when the physical distance remains unchanged.
In a city historically defined by its port, commerce and constant movement, the current strain has exposed another dimension of its vulnerability. While Port Sudan was built as a residential city, it was also conceived as a port city around which goods, workers, roads and markets revolved. As the war transformed it into an administrative, humanitarian and population center, its traditional functions began to overlap with new responsibilities for which it was never designed on such a scale. Where the port once served as the city’s primary engine of movement, hospitals, aid agency offices, workplaces, markets and transportation terminals have now become daily hubs of activity, all exerting pressure on the same urban corridors and streets.
This pressure is visible in congestion and in a shifting sense of time. The city once had its quiet hours, but today the day has expanded in unfamiliar ways. Movement begins earlier, work no longer ends at a fixed hour, and waiting has become part of daily routine. Between those searching for transport, those waiting for services, and those trying to reach their jobs, the city appears in constant motion, even when the streets of some neighborhoods lie still.
Yet this transformation cannot be read as a burden created by displaced people alone. Those who arrived in Port Sudan did not come by choice; they were driven by war into a city where they sought safety, work and services.
Longtime residents, in turn, have not lost their sense of empathy, but they have found themselves confronting a daily reality heavier than the old city’s capacity to bear.
The real tension, therefore, is not between residents and newcomers, but between a city of limited resources and a rapidly accelerating population reality imposed abruptly by war.
In this landscape, sidewalks, markets and transportation stops become revealing spaces that show not only a crowded city, but also how its uses have changed.
The current movement patterns in Port Sudan reflect a quiet struggle between the memory of a planned city that once moved in a steady, familiar rhythm and a new reality imposed by war and displacement.
A sidewalk once meant for walking may now serve as a waiting area or a place to display goods. A small square can turn into a gathering point. A familiar road may require more time to traverse. And distances once easily managed by residents have become, under congestion and rising costs, a new daily burden.
The current movement patterns in Port Sudan reflect a quiet struggle between the memory of a planned city that once moved in a steady, familiar rhythm and a new reality imposed by war and displacement on both residents and newcomers.
As road congestion reveals this overlap, it also exposes deeper social and economic shifts: how do people share space? How do market habits and street life change? And how does a coastal city, shaped by sea, port, climate and services, preserve its identity under such pressure?
Although the city today demonstrates a clear capacity for absorption and adaptation, its structural fragility has become more visible.
Port Sudan has not lost its defining features; it still carries the scent of the sea, the sound of the marketplace, and the calm of certain neighborhoods.
Yet it no longer moves with the same former rhythm. Between the memory of place and the movement of newcomers, the need for long-term solutions becomes evident: better organization of transportation and markets, protection of sidewalks and pedestrian routes, improved accessibility for people with disabilities, and an expansion of services suited to a demographic reality the city can no longer treat as temporary.
