Besahapio: A Modular Desert City That Feels Real

Most modular city proposals look modular. They read as diagrams: clean grids, identical units, systems-level thinking that forgets the street. Besahapio, a project by Beatrix Baltabol, is a modular city that looks like a city. The facades are textured. The streets are shaded. The plazas have steps to sit on. The system is there, but it is hidden behind the experience.

Shortlisted in the Extreme Habitat Challenge: Sahara on uni.xyz, Besahapio proposes a scalable urban settlement built on an iron grid framework, divided into nine quarters, and organised around courtyards, pedestrian streets, and public plazas. It is one of the most architecturally resolved entries in the competition.

The Grid: Rotated for Climate

The master plan sits on a grid rotated 30 degrees west of north. This is not a formal decision. It is a climate decision. The rotation maximises shadow coverage on the streets during the hottest hours and prevents the prevailing hot winds from blowing straight down the corridors. Every street in the city is shaded for most of the day because the grid angle was chosen for the sun, not for the map.

This is the kind of detail that separates a serious desert proposal from a diagram placed on sand. The rotation is invisible in the renders. You would never notice it walking through the city. But you would feel it: the streets are cooler because someone did the geometry.

Courtyard Housing: Traditional Logic, Modern Scale

The residential blocks are inspired by traditional Saharan courtyard houses. Dwellings wrap around shared green spaces, three to four storeys tall, with perforated stone facade screens that filter light and ventilate passively. The courtyards provide shade, privacy, and a social centre for each cluster. The screens are the most visually distinctive element: organic patterns cut into stone that read as both decoration and climate infrastructure.

The housing is not uniform. Heights vary between three and four storeys. Facades mix stone textures and screen patterns. The result is a neighbourhood that has the coherence of a system but the variety of a real place. This balance is difficult to achieve in modular design and the project handles it well.

Mixed-Use Blocks and the Street

The mixed-use prototypes stack retail, offices, clinics, and apartments into single structures. Lower floors face the street with commercial frontages. Upper floors step back for residential terraces. The city elevation shows this layering clearly: a varied skyline of perforated and patterned facades along a palm-lined boulevard.

The pedestrian priority is explicit. Streets are designed for walking, cycling, and micro-mobility. Below street level, a hyperloop network handles longer distances and connects Besahapio to external settlements. Cars are not part of the plan.

Public Plazas: Nine Quarters, Nine Centres

The city is divided into nine quarters, each with its own plaza. The plaza renders show stepped terraces with shade trees, seating, and open ground for markets and gatherings. These are not leftover spaces between buildings. They are the reason the buildings are arranged the way they are. The plan starts from the plazas and builds outward.

This approach, where public space organises the plan rather than filling its gaps, is what gives Besahapio its urban quality. The city feels inhabitable in the renders because the social spaces came first.

The Master Plan: Grid, Oval, Hyperloop

The overall plan is an oval grid with the hyperloop running tangentially and connecting to external networks. The building profile silhouettes show how height increases toward the centre and drops at the edges, creating a city that reads as a mound rather than a wall. This profile is both climatic (the centre is more protected) and social (the tallest, densest buildings are at the civic core).

Why This Project Matters

Besahapio is one of the most complete urban proposals in the EHC Sahara competition. It addresses climate at the grid level (rotation), housing at the block level (courtyards), public life at the quarter level (plazas), mobility at the city level (hyperloop), and identity at the facade level (perforated screens). Most entries address one or two of these scales. This one addresses all five.

For anyone studying modular urbanism, desert housing, or pedestrian city design, Besahapio demonstrates that systems thinking and spatial quality are not opposed. You can have a scalable grid and still have a city that is worth walking through.

View the Full Project

About the Designer

Designer: Beatrix Baltabol

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

If modular urbanism, climate-responsive planning, or desert architecture is the kind of work you want to pursue, uni.xyz runs competitions year-round that reward rigorous, multi-scale design thinking.

Project credits: Besahapio by Beatrix Baltabol. Shortlisted, Extreme Habitat Challenge: Sahara (uni.xyz).