Urban Sights: Urban History and Visual Culture

Urban Transformation in Twentieth Century Baghdad

Baghdad’s rural-to-urban migrant population mushroomed in the early 1950s as a result of government land tenure reforms that only worsened an already exploitative set of relations between landowners and labor. Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett’s study of these reforms describe in detail how government policies under the British Occupation, Mandate, and Monarchy periods worked to institutionalize top-down control of the country’s agricultural land by sheikhs and landlords. This was so severe that by 1958 just one percent of Iraq’s landowners owned 55.1% of all private land. During the 1930s, these politically motivated policies blatantly favored the landowning elite in order to “furnish the social base for the monarchy, and indirectly for the maintenance of British influence in the country,” creating a crisis of sweeping unemployment and underemployment across Iraq’s rural areas. Sluglett and Sluglett explain that, “migration from the land began as early as the end of the 1920s and continued throughout the rest of the period of the monarchy, particularly from the provinces of Kut and 'Amara to Baghdad, where whole areas of sarifas (shacks made from palm branches), the Iraqi equivalent of the North African bidonville, were constructed by the new arrivals.” 
 
As migrants rushed to major Iraqi cities in search of unskilled and low-skill job opportunities, the population in Baghdad grew from 515,459 residents in 1947 to 793,183 by 1957. The lack of adequate housing resulted in the prevalence of sarifa dwellings, which housed about 92,000 individuals by 1956. Over ten years, the ballooning housing shortage transformed Baghdad and the city continued to be the primary destination for rural peasant migrants seeking an escape from the oppression of exploitative landowning sheikhs. Housing was thus upheld as the solution for satisfying the perceived need to improve public relations between the oil rich state and the Iraqi people. Housing produced tangible images and spatial interventions in the city that had potential to make visible the ways in which the government was putting petrodollars to work in order to raise the standard of living for Iraqi people.



Nooraddin describes the Development Board’s overhaul of Al-Rasheed Street, a commercial boulevard in Rusafah that had been the first of many schemes to clear the city center for better vehicular and pedestrian traffic, during the 1950s. The new plan included “removing some structures to create new public squares and cutting or removing the balconies from buildings abutting the street so as to allow enough space for the London buses imported from England. Many buildings were also demolished and replaced with large and high-rise structures, so changing the established character of the street.” The government spent its petrodollars to transform Baghdad in such ways that created a spectacular public image of a modern capital, while in reality about 45% of housing in the city was located in sarifa settlements, where residents lived in mud reed huts without clean running water or electricity.

The Development Board invited several world-famous foreign architects to design landmark buildings for the capital, as part of its campaign to produce urban images of modern Baghdad that would make Iraqi oil wealth visible on an international stage. By the mid-1950s, Baghdad was at the heart of world modernism. Not only were internationally-renown modernist architects drawing up plans for new landmarks throughout the capital, but a vibrant home-grown discourse on the future of modern Iraqi architecture, painting, sculpture, poetry and literature was constantly circulating in meetings, exhibitions and conversations put on between Baghdad’s young practitioners and thinkers of the day. Images of the Iraqi capital as an emerging site of modernist architectural projects proliferated in periodicals around the world in the form of maps, drawings, and photographs. 



Haytham Bahoora writes, “The urban plans for Baghdad and the Development Board’s celebrated recruitment of internationally renowned modernist architects to design signature buildings in the city were more than innocuous attempts to build a modern city with its appropriate modern structures. These plans had, first, to be staged in the imagination. How was the spectacle of modernity staged? How was it narrated and rationalized?” I argue that the IPC documentaries worked to create an accessible, powerful and durable imaginary of oil modernity staged in the making of Baghdad as the modern oil capital of the Iraqi nation-state, as a counter-narrative to the severe and increasingly apparent  socio-economic disparities among urban residents and in particular new migrants to the capital. As this Scalar project has aimed to show, the films worked to shape this narrative by foregrounding images of modern built environments in juxtaposition to traditional spaces, and giving visibility to selected labor practices involved in the making of modern infrastructures and architectures. 

The IPC films deliberately projected a coherent imaginary of the modern nation that centered on the oil city to audiences across Iraq. Director Michael Clarke noted from his perspective that when The Third River first played in Iraqi cinemas, the oil film caused a powerful reaction among audiences. “It was said that people were not aware of their country - how [little] the Kurds really felt any sense of union with Iraqis in the deep south and the marsh Arabs.” The Third River was the oil company’s first attempt to produce a national imaginary for Iraqis residing in all parts of the country. The film established the dominant narrative that linked oil extraction to the promise of urban modernity, which ultimately signified national development.

The narrative of Ageless Iraq shifted emphasis away from moving pictures of the oil industry; however, the film maintained the same premise. According to the film, Baghdad was a modern city whose beauty, functionality, and social progress depended directly on oil wealth. The image of modern and urban Iraqi women is put forward as evidence of wider change on a national scale. On the other hand, A More Beautiful Capital, produced as part of the Beladuna series cut the oil industry out of the story altogether and focused instead on making short films about the transformations affecting the people of Iraq and region. In A More Beautiful Capital, the destruction of Baghdad’s old neighborhoods is rationalized as evidence of modernity, making way for new construction of “beautiful” public buildings and modernist housing estates.

According to internal company reports, IPC produced and distributed these films in full cooperation with the Iraqi government, “which welcomed the concept that films would publicise the country's historical traditions, plans for development and, generally speaking, arouse public interest, both inside and outside Iraq.” The same report claims that these films, “probably contributed to bringing Iraq before the public eye, both in the sense of awakening the interest of the Iraqi people themselves, many of whom had little or no concept of their own country's history and an equally sketchy knowledge of development projects.” The report then explains that the Iraqi government looked explicitly to the IPC, “to do a job of general publicity that, for various reasons, they were unable to do themselves.” In this sense, IPC’s films operated simultaneously as corporate and state propaganda directed at audiences in Iraq.

The collective experience of watching cinema is powerful and fosters the possibility of a national imaginary as well as a distinct experience of urban modernity. The Iraq Petroleum Company projected its films to citizens across Iraq, from oil workers in the fields and residents of Baghdad in the city center. In colloquial Arabic, the narration put words to the moving pictures of modern Iraq that linked these distant communities across the country. IPC and the Iraqi government relied on these oil films to produce a collective national imaginary of national territory, national history, and national identity for Iraqis. The underlying premise in these films is that oil is the lifeblood of modern Iraq.

Documentary film was the ideal medium for the oil company and the state to promote its narrative of the modern oil city. Images of new boulevards, schools, public buildings, automobile traffic and double decker buses signified the modernization of the built environment. This was held up on screen as evidence of petroleum’s promise. These films are efforts to imagine the modern nation of Iraq and naturalize oil wealth using images of the built environment to construct a modern geography of national territory, national history, and national identity.

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