Urban Planning Against the People: Doxiadis´ Plans for Baghdad and Urban Auto-Construction

Sadr City, the largest and most densely populated district in the east of Baghdad, was planned in the 1950s as a slum clearance project. In the context of the Cold War, urban planning had become part of the cultural 'war against communism' (Provoost 2006). The Greek urban planning and architecture firm of Constantinos Doxiadis was proposed to design Third World cities as an anti-thesis to 'communist cities' with their hierarchical top-down planning. A grid system of sectors was to 'facilitate the unlimited growth of people, money and cars' (Provoost 2006, p. 2), and the focus on a bottom-up approach to architectural planning was to be the antithesis to the communist understanding of state-imposed collectivism.

In the case of Iraq, Doxiadis was quickly dismissed as a consultant to the Iraqi government after the anti-monarchist coup of 1958, while his plans for urban reconstruction in Baghdad were not abandoned. In fact, the new government gave them a new superstructural understanding. Thus, the district became the "City of the Revolution", which Abdelkarim Qasim presented to Baghdad´s poor as their new city (Sudani, Al, Haider Atiya Kathim 2015).

In this paper, I examine Doxiadis' urban planning through an evaluation of Sadr City´s local politics. This research is based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Baghdad. I want to discuss how the urban structure of Sadr City in the 1960s and 1970s served the development of communist activities and the development of localised identities. The concept of ibn qita'i (son of my sector) shows the development of strong neighbourhood solidarities that challenged the penetration of the district by the central state and later the US-military. I will discuss this by looking at the tension between the planning of cities and their auto-construction by their inhabitants as dialectical relationship that illuminates the materiality of state-society-relations.