Housing as age-sensitive infrastructure under self-settled urban displacement: evidence from Sudanese households in Cairo

This study examines how older displaced Sudanese individuals living in Cairo evaluate housing in later life within a context dominated by insecure and externally governed private rental accommodations. Drawing on narrative interviews with 12 participants aged 51–86 years, this analysis explores how dwelling conditions are experienced in relation to bodily comfort, autonomy and future-oriented aspects of living. The findings indicate that displacement involves a transition between housing systems with fundamentally different capacities to support ageing. Former homes in Sudan were described as accumulative and adaptable environments shaped through long-term engagement, while housing in Cairo was experienced as provisional, resistant to modification and constrained by limited control and tenure insecurity. Across participants’ accounts, the capacity of housing to support later life depended on its ability to sustain future-making, enable bodily adaptation and provide adequate environmental conditions, such as light, space and outdoor access. Where these conditions were undermined, ageing was experienced not as continuity, but as suspension. This study contributes to built-environment research by reframing displacement as a transition between housing systems and demonstrating how housing operates as an age-sensitive infrastructure shaped through temporal, adaptive and environmental conditions of dwelling.