The Historicization and Theorization of Spatial Ruin in Wounded Baghdad

Abstract

Be it a consideration of the ruptured spatialities and urban forms of Baghdad in the present or reaching back into a volatile past, the city lives out arresting contradictions that beckon a different kind of understanding. Spatial woundedness carries within it many implications for how that pain is rendered. This is most visible in forms of cultural production that have settled the hurt exacted into a place of innovation. It is a full mutuality between architecture and the destruction that has violently defaced it so much so that a new image of urbanity begins to emerge. Beyond the agony felt by the capital, intellectualizing the spatial wound that has manifested and been given life as it were suggests a pressing need to comprehend this phenomenology. Historicizing and then theorizing what is a poetics of destruction assists in coming to comprehend not simply the features of an urban character necessarily born out of ruin but doing so against an orientalist narrative that seeks to entrench the Baghdadi space in perpetual liminality. The city fights back so that it may have a chance to survive but also creates lasting meaning between the real and unreal.