Navigating Identity and Place: The Role of Displacement Camps in Community Rebuilding and Identity Preservation in Sudan

Displacement camps are often framed as zones of impermanence; spaces of waiting designed to contain crises, not cultivate futures. Yet, in Kalma Camp in South Darfur, displacement has given rise to a self-organized, complex urban environment shaped by collective labor, cultural resilience, and everyday acts of spatial and political agency. This thesis explores how communities in Kalma have remade space, redefined home, and preserved identity in the face of prolonged uncertainty. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, spatial analysis, and critical urban theory, it situates Kalma not as an exception, but as a generative urban formation—an emergent city born from the margins. Through chapters that trace the camp’s spatial evolution, intergenerational understandings of belonging, informal governance, cultural production, and political expression, this research challenges dominant humanitarian paradigms that treat camps as temporary and peripheral. It argues that residents are not passive recipients of aid, but planners, builders, and cultural producers who contest displacement through care, memory, and infrastructure. By threading together theoretical insights from scholars such as Malkki, Bhabha, Roy, and Simone with grounded narratives from Kalma, the study reveals how displacement can also be a site of urban possibility. In reframing camps like Kalma as sites of urban life, not despite the crisis, but through it, this thesis calls for a fundamental shift in how urban planners, humanitarian actors, and scholars engage with protracted displacement. It invites us to see resilience as planning, care as governance, and the camp not as a space of suspension, but as a place where new urban futures are already being forged.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Sati, Maysaa

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Crockett, Karilyn

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/162102

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/162102