A CITY OF WALLS
MA ARCHITECTURE THESIS PROJECT- 2018
Walls built before 2010
Walls built after 2010
Walls to be built
Initiator of the wall
A City of Walls is a project which aims to open a debate on a topic often ignored, the question of the wall. The wall carries but it also separates and when it separates, it carries a message. It becomes a border, a delimitation between two camps, two countries, two communities. This universal phenomenon is echoed all around the world, separating more than 65 countries. They have as their main reasons : settlement, immigration, smuggling, terrorism and drug trafficking. The walls do not stop around countries, they also grow inside cities.
Indeed, this statement is verifiable in two cases of installation of walls for another reason than the ones given before, that of civil pacification: Belfast in northern Ireland and Baghdad in Iraq. In both cases, walls were installed to separate communities. Baghdad was chosen as the case study for this project, with walls of more than 5 km long, established in the city to separate two parts of the same people. These walls form a network of division inside the city.
The T-Wall is a type of wall, built in reinforced concrete and placed by US forces in so-called dangerous cities like Kabul in Afghanistan or Baghdad in Iraq. After the first civil war, a Walling Strategy was set up to control the territory of Baghdad.
Mixed Majority
Christian Majority
Sunni Majority
Shia Majority
BAGHDAD
A NETWORK OF LINES TO SEPARATE
These walls, which were to be temporary, became permanent in the city landscape since 2007. This network of lines that separates, and creates new interiors in the city, is contrasted through this project with another consequence of the war : the abandonment of land. In other words the vacant wastelands, and more precisely, the vacant wastelands of which only the walls remain and which create new exterior interiors at a smaller scale in the city. This phenomenon is fairly widespread in Baghdad (14 cases were identified thanks to a research based on satellite images) and one of them was chosen to show the staging methodology of these spaces.
WALLING STRATEGY
A NETWORK OF POINTS TO GATHER
Governmental
Residential
Commercial
Cultural
Educational
Industrial
Hotels
Religious
Green Spaces
It is in a spirit of reconquest of the city by its inhabitants, that this project aims to gather the people in these wastelands that carry the weight of war and its memory in them. Instead of having interiors dictated by communities and confrontations, this project aims to gather people in a mirrored scenery. This conclusion follows a long research on the wall, not as a negative symbol in a city but rather as a fertile object and a space producer. As a result, we move from a network of lines that separate to a network of points that gather. This network would be called the white zone, as a third significant space of the city, contrasted with the green zone of the government and the rest of Baghdad which is called the red zone.
GREEN ZONE
ABANDONNED LANDS CONTAINED BY WALLS
THE OLD GOVERNORATE
The land chosen to describe the project's intentions is that of the former courthouse of Baghdad, in the mixed and cultural area of the city. It was looted following the US invasion. The dirt of the destruction of this building, of which only the walls remain, has created a new ground level, a topography of the war.
The brick walls consumed by war and destruction, stripped from their coating, stand still in the landscape of the cultural area in Baghdad, surrounded by bookshops and historical buildings that describe what the city once looked like. These standing walls will constitute new public areas that would as the T-Wall do, protect the people behind them, give them shadow, and enable people to enjoy their city's space again.
TOPOGRAPHY OF WAR
STREET LEVEL
Instead of separating communities and neighborhoods, gradually destroying any sense of belonging to a wider society and erasing all of Baghdad's public spaces, these walls would help to safely gather people in an inclusive, white and peaceful zone. Starting this white zone with an abandoned government space is a way of pushing towards the reconquest of Baghdad by its people, for its people.
The space is staged and maintained in its state thanks to IPN struts. It is made accessible by stairs that links the public space to the parcel level, and is made usable thanks to covered parts and sitting areas built from abandoned bricks, that have fallen from the walls.
This project fits in the current situation of the city (project designed in 2018) that lacks funds to rebuild. These wastelands would be integral parts of the public space, and become like gardens in the city. This allows to restore trees and nature in Baghdad, which has lost a large part of its green landscape during the conflicts that have destroyed it in recent years.
