Urban Development in 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.

The IPC worked in cooperation with the Iraqi state through its public relations office 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. The company sponsored films and cine-magazine 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.