Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at how the claim of “ruralization” is integral part of the struggle over “making the city” and reveals how class is negotiated through this notion in the city of Baghdad.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at how the claim of “ruralization” is integral part of the struggle over “making the city” and reveals how class is negotiated.

Sadr City is the largest and most densely populated district of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. It was built in the 60s as a top-down government project to house poor rural migrants. The district´s grid system and small houses were meant to prevent the continuation of what was thought of as “rural life”. Although it is home today to at least one third of Baghdad´s population and huge part of the city´s workforce, it has been framed ever since as “another” space and the place of “the other” by the political elites and the population of the “older” districts.

Successive military putsches stopped the implementation of the full plan for the district. This led to the district´s population largely doing auto-construction of their houses, streets and other infrastructures. Still, today the district and its inhabitants are framed as agents of a process of “ruralization” of the “civilized” Baghdad. Sadr City is seen as “unmaking the city”. This becomes even more relevant in the light of the latest urban development processes in Baghdad.

The paper explores ethnographically how the making of the district and the perceived unmaking of Baghdad is produced in the everyday life of Sadr City´s population.

Based upon extended fieldwork in Baghdad this paper offers insight into how the “unsettled city-making” of one district is essential to the making of Baghdad.