The Master Plans of Baghdad: Notes on GIS-Based Spatial History The Master Plans

of Baghdad: Notes
on GIS-Based
Spatial History
Łukasz Stanek

In 1967 the state planning office Miastoprojekt Krakow from socialist Poland delivered the master plan
of Baghdad which, together with its amendment that followed in 1973, provided the legal framework for
the development of the Iraqi capital during the oil-boom era. With the 1973 plan about to be replaced by
a new one, a graduate seminar Mapping Baghdad 1956-2016 at the Manchester School of Architecture
looked back at the fifty years of history of Miastoprojekt’s plans for Baghdad, their guiding ideas, and
their impact on the development of the city. In collaboration with scholars from Baghdad University and
the Institut français du Proche-Orient, we have used Geographic Information System (GIS) with archival
planning documents and maps collected during my long-term research project about the flows of
architectural expertise between socialist countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and West Africa in
the cold war. The following article documents this experience of working with GIS systems with
heterogeneous and ambiguous data; and shares some findings of the seminar. In particular, GIS-based
research allowed us to clarify the planning approach that informed the master plans; to identify the
extent to which they guided the development of housing, green spaces, transportation systems, and
heritage preservation in Baghdad from the 1960s to the 1980s; and to speculate about their effects on
architectural culture in Iraq.

 
 + Hover over a feature...

Leaflet | qgis2web, © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA,

[Fig. 1: Land use and traffic system as foreseen by the 1967 master plan of Baghdad, geo-referenced on current map of Baghdad
(OpenStreetMap). Interactive shape file produced in QGIS on the basis of archival documentation from a private archive, Kraków,
Poland. Produced at the Mapping Baghdad seminar, Manchester School of Architecture (2016).]

The Master Plans and their Impact

The 1960s and 1970s marked a period of explosive growth in Baghdad, which coincided with its
emergence as a major centre of architectural culture in the Arab world. And yet scholars have given little
attention to the urban development, architecture, and planning of the city in this period relative to the
preceding and the following decades: the 1950s, when the first generation of Iraqi architects came of
age and renown modernists from Western and Northern Europe and North America received prestigious
commissions; and the turn of the 1980s, a decade of well documented urban reconstruction of Baghdad
under Saddam Husain (Al Slik 2008, Azara 2008, Fethi 1985, Levine 2015, Pieri 2015a, Pieri 2015b, Pyla
2008). One reason for this lacuna is a scarcity of sources, many of which were destroyed or dispersed
after the bombings of Baghdad in 1991, the siege of 2003, and the violence that followed. Unlike the
material from prior and subsequent decades, documents about Baghdad’s architecture and urban
planning between the regimes of Qasim and the Ba’ath party are narrowly represented in the archives in
the United States and its Western European allies from the cold war period, that have informed most
existing studies of Iraq’s urban development. This uneven distribution of archival material resulted from
the geopolitical shift in Iraq: while never completely severing the networks of technical expertise
established during the Hashemite regime, the Qasim government summoned architects, planners, and
construction companies from socialist Eastern Europe to fill in the demand for technical knowledge.
Consequently, these professionals contributed significantly to the development of Baghdad in the course
of the 1960s and 1970s, and crucial sources for urban and architectural history of the city from this
period can be found in archives located in Russia and the former Soviet satellites (Bulgaria, Czech
Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania), as well as in the countries of the former Yugoslavia (in
particular Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Macedonia).

The master plans by the Polish state firm Miastoprojekt are among the most important of such sources.
They replaced Baghdad’s first master plan, delivered in 1956 by the British firm Minoprio, Spencely, and
MacFarlane (Levine 2015), while sharing with it the principles of broadly understood tradition of modern
urban planning, such as functional zoning and the environmentalization of the city. Differences between
the two planning approaches concerned the role of regional planning, heritage preservation, and traffic
planning, which, in the case of Miastoprojekt, reflected the Polish experience of post-war reconstruction
and longer traditions of Central European urban design. It is however the contrast between the twenty-
three pages of the British plan and the four volumes of the Polish one that points at the most
fundamental difference between the political economies that conditioned the production of both plans.
It was the political economy of state socialism that allowed for the large Polish team to be permanently
located in Baghdad, its interdisciplinary composition, and its integration into Iraqi institutions and
professional life (Stanek 2012, 2017).

The specific conditions of work of Polish planners in Iraq facilitated the empirical, embedded, and
scenario-based character of the plan and, in turn, its impact on the ground. The fact that the plan was
based on the first comprehensive survey of Baghdad allowed for fine-tuning planning concepts
according to the conditions of particular neighborhoods, thus avoiding large-scale demolitions and
expropriations that characterized much of the 1950s urbanization in the historical center. The embedded
way of planning, with Iraqi decision makers approving every step of the plan and reviewing building
applications against it before its official acceptance, provided a good training for the plan’s future uses.
Discussions, exhibitions, and seminars organized with local professionals delineated new tasks for Iraqi
architecture brought about by the plan, in particular the typology of the multi-story housing suitable for
Arab inhabitants and buildings that respected the historical context. Since the plan offered various
scenarios based on alternative predictions, it was flexible and correctable as new data was becoming
available (Stanek 2017). In result, the plans provided effective frameworks for the city’s development for
the two decades that followed, and particular aspects of their impact on the ground have been critically
discussed by Iraqi scholars, including heritage preservation (Fethi 1977) and land subdivision (Al Slik
2016).

Archival Sources and Data Criticism

The graduate seminar on Mapping Baghdad 1956—2016   contributed to this debate by studying
documents from public and private archives in Eastern Europe, Iraq, and the United States. In particular,
we focused on three master plans (drawings and written documentation) and five maps of the city:

“Master Plan of Baghdad” by Minoprio, Spenceley, and Macfarlane (1956), scale 1:25,000
US Army map of Baghdad (1958), scale 1:12,500.
“Master Plan of Baghdad” by Miastoprojekt Kraków and Polservice (1967), various scales
“Comprehensive Development Plan of Baghdad 2000,” by Miastoprojekt Kraków and Polservice (1973),
various scales
Soviet military map of Baghdad (1976), scale 1:25,000
“The Integrated Capital Development Plan of Baghdad” (1987) by Japanese Consortium of Consulting
Firms (JCCF), various scales
Soviet military map of Baghdad (1991), scale 1:20,000
Tourist map of Baghdad (2003), scale 1:25,000

These drawings were supported by additional documents, such as articles published by the members of
the master planning teams, Iraqi newspapers (in English and Arabic), and architectural and urban design
blueprints by foreign and Iraqi architects (Mohamed Makiya, Kahtan Awni, Hisham Munir, Kahtan Madfai,
Rifat Chadirji). These designs responded to the requirements of the master plan and were sometimes
developed with members of the Miastoprojekt team and other architects from Eastern Europe in
Baghdad.
[Fig. 2: Excerpts from the master plans and maps studied during the Mapping Baghdad workshop. Top left to right: “Master Plan of
Baghdad” by Minoprio, Spenceley, and Macfarlane (1956); US Army map of Baghdad (1958); “Master Plan of Baghdad” by
Miastoprojekt Kraków and Polservice (1967); “Comprehensive Development Plan of Baghdad 2000,” by Miastoprojekt Kraków and
Polservice (1973). Bottom left to right: Soviet military map of Baghdad (1976); “The Integrated Capital Development Plan of
Baghdad” (1987) by Japanese Consortium of Consulting Firms (JCCF); Soviet military map of Baghdad (1991); Tourist map of
Baghdad (2003).]

The archival maps and plates of the master plans were geo-referenced by means of QGIS, an open
source, Geographic Information System (GIS) software. Each of them was digitalised (redrawn) by the
participants of the seminar as vector data (shape files) consisting of two layers: land use and traffic
network, subdivided according to categories specific for each archival document. These operations
transformed each archival document into a database of points, lines, and polygons that becomes an
analytic tool that allows to ask questions about the relationship between these features and, as they
refer to real-world coordinate systems, to other datasets, including those representing current conditions
on the ground (DeBats and Gregory 2011; Jaskot et al., 2015). Figure 1 shows the digitalised master
plan of 1967, based on the plate “Zoning and Land-Use” (scale 1:20,000) and its eleven primary land use
categories, to which the classification of roads was added according to the accompanying report. Eight
such shape files, extended by the current map of Baghdad (OpenStreetMap), constitute a database used
in the seminar to query the plans’ principles and their impact on the ground. Being collaborative, based
on visualisations, dependent on digital tools, open ended, and focused on space, we understood this
approach as a contribution to spatial history (White 2010).
The resulting database is both a representation of the city in discrete historical moments, and a
knowledge generator about Baghdad’s development. Since all data is capta, taken rather than given
(Drucker 2014), both uses need to account for the heterogeneity and ambiguity of the underlying
documents. Such account started with the basic distinction between a plan and a map, and was
extended to their differentiations in terms of scales, symbolization, classification, and baseline data
(aerial photography and surveys). Reading the complete documentation of the master plans clarified
their classifications on the drawings; for instance, the designation of the historical parts of Rusafa and
Karkh as ”commerce” in the 1967 plan was qualified by the report, which acknowledged the
multifunctional uses of these areas. In other instances, our reading discovered blind spots in the
methodology that had consequences for planning decisions (for example, the calculation of needs for
mosques in each neighbourhood was based on the total number of inhabitants without distinguishing
between denominations).

This critical approach meant that the smooth space of GIS operations always needed to be confronted
with the striated space of the historical material, and the conceptual choices made by the producers of
the master plans and the maps (comp. Talbert and Elliot 2008). In the following recapitulation of the
seminar’s findings, I will point out how quantitative comparisons across maps that allowed for
speculating about the city’s development were checked against the possible incommensurability of the
underlying categories. Furthermore, I will indicate how the seamless zooming in and out, that GIS makes
possible, was problematized by an introduction of a more granular resolution of the urban designs and
architectural projects that followed, reinterpreted, opposed or violated the decisions of the master plans.

Housing, Urban Structure, and Green Spaces

Based on the database, the seminar demonstrated that the planners’ decisions concerning the
allocation and typology of housing in the master plan were among the most consequential for the
development of Baghdad. By the time the members of the Miastoprojekt team arrived to Iraq, sarifas
(slum dwellings) amounted to almost half of all buildings in Baghdad (Jędraszko 1962), and solving the
housing crisis was among Qasim’s priorities. The comparison of the residential areas surveyed for the
purposes of the JCCF plan in 1985 with the housing layouts in the eight districts foreseen in the 1973
plan [Figure 3] shows that the latter guided the allocation of housing until the mid-1980s, in particular in
the west and in the north-east of the city. The seminar also studied the share of multi-story housing in
this growth in view of the decision of the master plan (1967) that required such housing to become
twenty percent of the housing stock in 1990.

 
 [Fig. 3: Comparison of housing allocation as foreseen by the 1973 plan with the location of housing according to a land use survey
in 1985. Analytical diagram based on redrawn archival documents from a private archive, Kraków, Poland; and a private archive,
Baghdad, Iraq. Produced at the Mapping Baghdad seminar, Manchester School of Architecture (2016).] 
 

More generally, Figure 3 shows that the urbanization of Baghdad within the municipal boundary followed
the basic structure proposed by Miastoprojekt’s master plan: a multifunctional “Tigris belt” flanked by
two belts of residential districts. The districts were subdivided into smaller entities and designed as self-
sufficient, including social facilities and a limited light industry to provide employment. This design
approach followed Miastoprojekt’s experience of planning Nowa Huta, the “first socialist city in Poland,”
which combined an axial plan specific for socialist-realist urban composition with the tradition of
modern urban planning since the nineteenth century. In continuation of this experience, Miastoprojekt’s
main tool for the management of welfare distribution in Baghdad were urban norms that allowed to
calculate the program of education, health, cultural, and religious facilities according to the number of
inhabitants in the catchment areas. These norms, spelled out in the master plans’ documentation, were
influential and continued to be referenced by planners in the years to come; for instance, as in the Al
Salam neighborhood (south-western Baghdad), designed by the Indian practice Vikas Kosh in 1981 and
completed in 1985 (Chauhan 1991). Figure 4 shows that this layout complies with the master plan’s
recommendations of up to 300m access to primary school and other facilities, and up to 800m access
to public transport. By contrast, the parking provisions recommended by the master plan were exceeded
in this design.

[Fig. 4: The application of urban norms from the 1973 master plan in the Al Salam neighbourhood, Baghdad, designed by Vikas
Kosh (1981-85). Analytical diagram based on drawings published by Chauhan (1991). Produced at the Mapping Baghdad seminar,
Manchester School of Architecture (2016).]
 

The Al Salam plan also complied with the provision of green spaces as specified by the master plan
(between three and seven sq.m. per person depending on location). Access to green spaces was a key
concern of the plans, and Figure 5 makes use of GIS in order to calculate and represent the distances of
the (geometric) center of each neighborhood to the nearest green space. These spaces were conceived
as a part of a system of transversal belts airing the city and, together with the green belt around
Baghdad, they added to a comprehensive plan of its environmental protection. As Figure 3 shows, in
1985 some of the green belts were interrupted by urban fabric that violated the plan, thus undermining
its overall environmental and redistributive performance. However, this assessment needs to be
qualified by accounting for areas with private gardens, which, as scholars have pointed out (Pieri 2015b),
play an important role in the ecology of the city.
 [Fig. 5: Distance between neighbourhood centres and the system of green spaces in the 1973 master plan.

Analytical diagram based on redrawn archival documents from a private archive, Kraków, Poland. Produced at the Mapping
Baghdad seminar, Manchester School of Architecture (2016).]

Traffic Planning and Heritage

Besides housing, the second key area of impact by the master plan was traffic planning. The plan
introduced a uniform classification of roads as the basis for a comprehensive traffic network, consisting
of five radial roads (extending to the principal directions in the region) that linked the districts and were
joined in the “Motorway Box”, a quadrangle ring road around Rusafa and Karkh [Figure 1]. Comparison
between the road network in 1991 and the 1973 master plan in Figure 6 shows that the location of the
main roads in the city generally followed the master plan. Since the archival material does not allow a
conclusive assessment of road classification in 1991, the functional coherence of the realized network
requires further study.
   [Fig. 6: Comparison of the street network in 1991 with the network as foreseen by the 1973 master plan. Analytical diagram
based on redrawn archival documents from a private archive, Kraków, Poland; and the Library of Congress, Washington DC.
Produced at the Mapping Baghdad seminar, Manchester School of Architecture (2016).]

In the master plans, traffic planning was conceived together with the development of public spaces
(such as the reorganization of the Tahrir Square in the early 1970s) and the protection of architectural
heritage. By contrast to Minoprio, Miastoprojekt’s plans for Baghdad’s districts stressed the “priceless
scientific, didactic, and aesthetic importance” of the historical fabric of Baghdad and not only of its
monuments (Miastoprojekt n.d., 345). This approach followed the reconstruction of Warsaw after World
War II and Polish debates on the negotiation between the historical image of the city and modern traffic
planning (Ostrowski 1980). Figure 7 compares the invasive traffic planning in Kadhemiya in the Minoprio
master plan with the 1973 plan, which supported the preservation concept of Kadhemiya as a whole by
lowering the intensity of traffic in and around the area (this scheme was not implemented).

 
  [Fig. 7: Traffic in Kadhemiya: comparison of the street layout in the 1956 (Minoprio) and the 1973 (Miastoprojekt) master plans,
and the 1976 map. Analytical diagram based on redrawn archival documents from a private archive, Kraków, Poland; and the
Library of Congress, Washington DC. Produced at the Mapping Baghdad seminar, Manchester School of Architecture (2016).]

In difference to Kadhemiya, Miastoprojekt planners and administrators at the Municipality of Baghdad

concluded that the complete preservation of Rusafa and Karkh would exceed the financial possibilities
of the Iraqi state. Hence, the plan introduced several categories of preservation, including the
conservation of individual monuments and of clusters of historical fabric within pedestrianized zones,
specified in Miastoprojekt’s’ “Outlines for detailed plans” for Rusafa and Karkh (scale 1:2500). These
principles were followed by the design of a multifunctional complex in Shorjah (Rusafa) [Figure 8] by
Mohamed Makiya, Fuad Uthman and the Czech architect Jan Čejka (1969, unbuilt), all educators at the
newly founded School of Architecture, University of Baghdad (Al Slik, Stanek 2015). Their design
integrated mosques, churches and clusters of historical buildings within the 1967 zoning plan and a
monorail foreseen by it, while accepting the demolition of large parts of the area.
 [Fig. 8: The interpretation of the 1967 master plan (principles of zoning, transportation, historical preservation) by the design for
Shorjah, designed by Mohamed Makiya, Fuad Uthman, Jan Čejka (1969, unbuilt). Analytical diagram based on redrawn archival
documents from a private archive, Kraków, Poland; and a private archive, Münster, Germany.  Produced at the Mapping Baghdad
seminar, Manchester School of Architecture (2016).]

Towards a Spatial Archive

The seminar concluded with an attempt at mapping the hiatus between the cartographic material and
the urban reality of Baghdad under sanctions and occupation in the early twenty-first century, the latter
understood by means of newspaper articles, movies, and reports given by recent visitors to Baghdad
who shared their experience with the participants of the seminar. The partitions, zones, and barriers
dramatically shifted the everyday of Baghdad’s inhabitants away from the fluid mobilities implied by the
diagrams of traffic routes and from the evenly distributed access to facilities envisaged by the smooth
surfaces of land use plans. At the same time, the challenges of current and future re-planning Baghdad
that became apparent in this work were for us a motivation to transform the results of the seminar
towards a spatial archive which, when completed, would become both a repository of archival materials
and an analytical tool box for their study. The eight GIS shape files are the first step which offers an
insight into the city’s under-researched past for scholars in architecture, planning, history, geography,
and other disciplines; but also for architects, planners, administrators and the general public, thus
adding modernist heritage to the layers of history that continue to inspire Baghdad’s futures.

[I would like to thank Ghada Al Slik, Paul Jaskot, Caecilia Pieri, the participants of the seminar InVisu (INHA-
CNRS) in Paris (April 18, 2017), and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on the draft version of
this text.]

Manchester School of Architecture, “Large Data Architectural Research: Mapping Baghdad, 1956—2016”,
Winter Semester 2016

Unit leader: Łukasz Stanek

Collaboration: Mazin Al Saffar
Advisors: Ghada Al Slik (University of Baghdad), Caecilia Pieri (Institut français du Proche-Orient)
Postproduction: Łukasz Stanek, Erika Mikulionyte, Viktor Petkov, Mahmud Tantoush
Students: Lamiaa Abouelala, Samuel Bland, James Daubeney, Michael Harrison, Afshin Khalife, Charlotte
Mercan, Erika Mikulionyte, Matilde Miuzzi, Stephen Morris, Evagelia Nella, Viktor Petkov, Joseph
Smithard, Adrian Wong, Joshua Pearson, Mahmud Tantoush
GIS support: Jonny Huck, Lune Geographic
Participants of the PhD seminar (co-funded by DH@manchester): Sana Al Naimi, Ula A. Khalel Merie,
Mazin Al Saffar, Mohamad Al Taha

 
____________________________

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