This essay looks at the case of Collective Towns in Iraqi Kurdistan as an example of how State interventions on the ground are often instruments utilised to implement broader po-litical plans. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s the Iraqi government made full use of spatial planning as a constitutive part of the strategy of “dealing with the Kurdish prob-lem”. Recchia’s argument is that the Ba’ath regime adopted urban planning and space design as social engineering devices in its larger scheme of shaping society into a more homogenous and simplified form. The Iraqi government used the combination of ethnopolitics and a centralised ideology of modernisation to heavily intervene in the management and design of territory, causing a systematic disruption of local knowledge and practices.

The e-Book includes a photo-Essay by Leo Novel about the Mujamma’a or Collective Towns which initially responded to a logic of rationalisation and cost-effectiveness, but was successively turned into one of the political tools that the regime of Saddam Hussein used to manage the tensions with the Kurdish population of Iraq.