
Sadr City, also known as Al Thawra City, is located on the far eastern side of Baghdad in Al Rusafa. The original name, Al Thawra City (meaning revolution in Arabic), derives from the July 14, 1958 revolution. The city’s name was later changed to Al Sadr City after Mohammad Sadeq Al-Sadr – an important religious cleric – following the fall of Baghdad and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In this brief, we will refer to it as ‘Almedina’, or ‘the city’, as locals often do.
Providing housing for Baghdad’s urban poor, the majority of which were migrants from Iraq’s rural areas in the south, Almedina was designed by Greek city planner Constantinos Doxiadis, part of the large-scale projects launched by the Iraqi Development Board in the mid-1950s, Almedina’s urban model consisted of repetitive housing and neighbourhood designs that would accommodate the displaced migrants, around whom, a belt of improvised settlements had begun to form. Doxiadis’ planning had one main objective: to design housing for low-income families, and he did so without taking into consideration social structure, the spirit of the place or the potential for enormous growth in a relatively very short period of time.
What resulted were poorly kept areas, consisting of narrow and closed roads that connect to very modest public facilities. One of the remaining consequences is the overcrowding of residential units, which now house up to three times their intended capacity. The implementation of Almedina’s infrastructure has not been completed, either, and some of the streets remained unpaved until very recently.
