This talk focuses on the architectural production of rural cultivators in southern Iraq who were forced into debt bondage and dispossessed from their lands leading them to migrate to Baghdad between 1920 and 1965. This migration took place during a period when Iraq was gradually shifting from an agricultural to an oil-based economy.

This mass migration resulted in the large-scale constructing of sarifa and kukh (reed and mud) neighborhoods on occupied state and private lands. These neighborhoods became the sites from which large scale challenges to the economic and territorial authority of the Iraqi state were consolidates, as migrants participated in strikes and protest movements that would eventually result in the 1958 revolution.

This period was also marked by a macroeconomic devaluation of migrant labor and their architectural production in national income accounts, which further supported the case for the destruction of migrant settlements in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the erasure of reed and mud settlements across Baghdad only further dispossessed tens of thousands of migrants, who were relocated to yet another territory of dispossession, i.e. Sadr City.

This talk thus argues that the Iraqi state whose model of economic growth was premised on an iterative process of dispossession was not able to “solve” the alleged problem of the migrant slum, but only assign the problem to a new territory or population.

Huma Gupta is an urban and architectural historian of the Middle East and a Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World at NYU Abu Dhabi. She received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019. Her research focuses on the role of migrant settlements in the formation of the twentieth century state of Iraq. Gupta's current book project, The Architecture of Dispossession is an intellectual and political history of how "informal" settlements inhabited by dispossessed rural migrants and their customary architectural production from reed, mud, and palm frond was economically devalued in Iraq and across the world.

Speakers
Huma Gupta, Humanities Research Fellow, NYUAD